Frontera

“No,” he said. She could feel it too, he saw, the sexual symbolism of his having penetrated her house; she revealed it in the quick, nervous gestures of her hands.“Where’s Curtis?” he said.

“Out,” she said, holding his eyes for a moment, and then suddenly turning away.The room was crowded with plants: bamboo, palms, grasses, and ferns.The air smelled rich, primordial.

“Out where? I have to see him.”

“I’m afraid,” she said, her voice strained, unnatural,“he can’t be disturbed right now.”

Kane moved to his feet, took her by one wrist.“What are you saying? Where is he?” He felt as if he were reading the words; he was only aware of the nearness of her body, the heat of it.

“He...he keeps one of the abandoned houses with power and air. He’s there right now with Lena.”

Kane let go of her wrist.‘‘I’m sorry,” he said. She took another step deeper into the hallway.

Lamps over the plants carved the curtained half-light into spaces that excluded Kane. He moved toward Molly again, drawn by her electric field, sensing their exchange of quanta as a tingling along his skin.As he touched her lightly on one arm, her current surged low in his spine.

“Kane...” she said, almost a plea, but he wasn’t sure for what. He sensed her uncertainty and fear, but they broke harmlessly over the momentum of his need.

She turned to face him. His palms followed the sides of her breasts to the long, smooth latissimus muscles along her sides. She gripped his elbows, her eyes losing focus.

In her bedroom the smell of her was stronger, warm and sweet. She turned and faced him again, tearing loose the velcro fasteners and exposing her breasts almost defiantly, pulling her arms free of the sleeves. Kane tugged at the knot in his belt, unwilling for just that instant to go on with it, the inevitable coupling and climax, preferring instead the complex emotional ambience of the seduction itself, the currents of power tinged with weakness and guilt, the hesitation, the surrender.

Molly kicked her clothes away and Kane shed his hipari, reaching back to push the revolver into the heap of olive drab material as he slid his trousers to the floor.

She sat on the edge of the bed, spine curved, breasts pointing downward, her nervousness aging her prematurely. Kane put one knee on the sheet next to her and pushed her gently by the shoulders until she lay on her back, arms extended behind her. He gripped her waist, just above the hips, where he could feel the primal power of her sexuality. Her legs opened to him and he could smell the heat and darkness of her, the scent turning sharp as she became aroused. He spread her labia with his thumbs and flicked his tongue into her cleft to get the taste of her.

Her hips moved slowly against the mattress. Her eyes were open, her teeth pinning her lower lip. Kane wondered what she saw.

He raised her knees until her heels sank into the bed, and then, left hand under her buttocks, he guided himself into her with the other.

His hands moved up her body, fingertips just brushing her fragrant skin, his weight shifting forward to rest on his left elbow and right palm. He held himself rigid, motionless, feeling the tension coiling in his spine. His breath began to come more quickly as the pleasure burned through his groin, across his hips, and down into the contractions of his toes.

Then, slowly, he began to move in and out of her, lowering himself until he could feel the mass of her breasts against his damaged ribs. Her hands tangled themselves in the sheet behind her head, clawing at it in rhythmic contractions. Her excitement built slowly, seemingly against her will, until her jaw and shoulders were tight with it.

A ringing split the silence.

Kane looked up, saw the bedside phone flashing red. Molly seemed oblivious, introverted, locked into a divergent, subjective reality.The sudden, convulsive pressure of her pubic ridge confused and disoriented him, then he realized she was approaching orgasm.

He touched the hard point of her left nipple and she rolled him over onto his back, both her hands on the bandages of his chest, rocking hard until her entire body shook. Kane held her hips and thrust against her, not letting her finish. His throat muscles went tight. He felt his eyes roll back in his head and his leg muscles spasm as he pumped his climax into her, and when it was done they lay without moving, her head and breasts resting on his chest, his hot fluid turning cool as it flowed back down his shaft and pooled on the sheet under him, the red light of the phone still flashing, silently now, at the far end of the bed.

They had reached the neutrality of afternoon.

Molly rolled onto her back.After a time she said,“When you find him, what happens then?”

“I don’t know,” Kane told her.“Does it matter to you? How much do you care what happens to him?”

“Once upon a time,” she said,“everything in the universe was in one great, huge ball of fire.All the bits and pieces were controlled by the same interactions. Everything was symmetrical.”

Kane turned on his side to look at her.

“Then things started to cool down,” she said.“The symmetry broke down. One by one the different interactions turned into different things. Gravity, strong, weak, electromagnetic forces. Particles formed atoms and molecules and stars and planets and people.At every step the symmetrical patterns had to break down to become more complex. But without that symmetry breaking, there could never have been any life or intelligence in the universe.”

“I don’t get it,” Kane said.“What are you saying?”

“Things break up. Marriages break up. But they were once together. Everything in the universe still has that memory of having been part of the same thing. Everything is still connected.”

“Like you and Curtis, is that it? Still connected?”

She didn’t answer him. She lay for another moment, totally relaxed, and then suddenly swung around to the end of the bed and snatched the telephone receiver. She keyed four digits, waited, then said,“Molly.”

Kane propped his head on one hand to watch her. She had eluded him somehow, despite the intensity of their physical coupling.

“Yes,” she said to the phone.“All right. I’ll be there.” She hung up, then stared at the floor, as if trying to focus her energies.

“Curtis?” Kane asked.

“No,” she said.“It’s the Russian ship.They’re coming in.”

She went to her closet and looked for something dignified to wear to meet the Russians.The best she could find was a sort of orange padded cape and trousers.

Her own calmness surprised her, even frightened her a little. She’d just been unfaithful, for the first time in 13 years of marriage, and it was like nothing had happened at all.

No, she thought. Something had happened. Nothing as melodramatic as the end of her marriage; that had been over for years in any real sense. Something had changed inside her, not a sudden rush of guilt or desolation, but instead a growing sense of her own strength and power.

It had come from Kane. She remembered something Verb had said to her months ago, one of her feeble attempts at humor, when she was talking about her new physics as “quantified destiny.” She made some joke about “destinons,” quantum particles of fate that bound people and events through the fourth dimension.

For Molly there was more truth in the idea than even Verb would admit; she knew that she and Kane had exchanged more than bodily fluids and neural release.

Kane frightened her. He was quirky, nervous, with the dark, flitting eyes of a bird and an aura of suppressed violence that seemed detached from his intellect. But it wasn’t fear that had opened her so completely to him, and now, as she felt his fingers close on her arm, she promised herself that she would not be physically intimidated by him.

“You’d better get dressed,” she said.

“You’ve known about this,” he said.“How long?”

“They launched within a couple of days of your ship.They weren’t firing messages off at us like you guys were, but we picked up some of their signals back to Moscow. Morgan must have known. Didn’t he say anything to you?”

Kane took his hand away.“No. Of course not.What did you get from their signals?”

“Nothing.What’s there to say? They’re here for the same reason you are. Obviously.” In saying it she had identified Kane as her enemy, or at least her rival, but Kane seemed to miss the implicit threat.

“Good,” Kane said.“If I can find out what the Russians want, then maybe I’ll know something.”

Is he joking? she wondered. She took her clothes into the bathroom, and when she came back Kane had dressed.

“What about Curtis?” Kane asked.“Is he going to be there?”

“There’s no telling. If he wants to know about it, then he knows.”

Kane said,“I don’t see the two of you together, somehow.”

Molly shrugged.“He’s changed.You want to see the landing?”

“Why not?”

“Walk with me.”

They masked and went outside. Kane looked even more predatory in his mask, Molly thought. It left nothing to focus on but those black, shark-like eyes.

“I don’t know,” she said.“Maybe he hasn’t changed, not really. It’s so easy to talk about power corrupting and all that. But which came first, the idealism, or the lust for power? I mean, maybe all the ideals were just a means to an end.”

“What kind of ideals are we talking about?”

“Nine years ago, when everything went wrong, Curtis saved this place.” She moved her hand and the circle took in the dome over their heads, the orange grove around them, two teenage girls leaning against one of the living modules, wires leading from their temples to a small metal box.“He did it just about singlehandedly.All anybody cared about was getting through from one day to the next, and it wasn’t enough. Then Curtis comes along and starts talking about twenty, thirty, fifty years ahead.

“I think it was the first time any of us confronted the fact that we’d given up, we’d all decided there wasn’t going to be a twenty years from now. Curtis changed that. He said we didn’t need Earth, that we could make our own Earth, only better. It sounds trite and stupid when I say it, but Curtis painted it, he sold it, until we could all feel it and smell it and taste it. Just the idea, just the hope that you could look at the sky without having a sheet of plastic between you and it.”

“Terraforming,” Kane said.

“Then you’ve heard all this.”

“Just the word, is all.”

“Curtis believed in the ‘pressure point’ approach, that you can change a few little things and get big results. Like if you dumped some dust on the poles, the heat absorption would melt the ice and increase the atmospheric pressure which would start a greenhouse effect which would melt more ice.There’s supposed to be enough frozen junk at the poles and around here on the Tharsis ridge to bring us up to a full bar of pressure, same as Earth.”

“That’s a lot to happen in twenty or thirty years.”

“Sure, but in the meantime you’ve got oases. Drop some ring ice from Jupiter or Saturn, say, into a nice low area and blow out a crater ten kilometers deep.You’ve got heat and gasses from the impact, and the crater will hold the higher air pressure.”

Kane stopped, put his hands in his trouser pockets.“What are you, crazy? ‘Drop some ring ice.’ How the hell are you going to go get this ice? With a leftover mem and some ice water for propellant?”

He really doesn’t know, she thought.About the physics, the transporter, the antimatter, none of it.

“It’s not impossible,” she said.“We have to make everything here. The air you’re breathing out of that tank is manufactured.We can make rocket fuel, we can make stages, we can fix the ships still in orbit.We could do it.”

“So why didn’t you?”

“It...I don’t know. It was just too hard, I guess. It would take sacrifices.There’d be less booze,less energy for Curtis and his pals to go riding around in the jeeps. By the time we’d sacrificed long enough that we could actually talk about building the ships, everybody was tired of sacrifices.”

“Even you?”

“Maybe even me, a little. But I could stand it, if it would give us ships. And if we had ships I wouldn’t just go to Saturn and turn back.You

know? I mean, sure, build the oases, but don’t stop there. Not with the

rest of the universe out there waiting.”

“You sound like Reese.”

With good reason, she thought. She said,“Yeah, I suppose I do.” She looked back and saw Blok hurrying toward them. She had a moment of panic—Blok would be able to tell at a glance that she and Kane had been to bed, he would tell Curtis—but it passed as quickly as it came. It was the same as with the Russians. If Curtis wanted to know he probably already knew. She didn’t doubt for a nanosecond that he had his own bedroom as thoroughly wired as the rest of the dome.

She started walking again, pulling Kane along with her voice.“I suppose Curtis is as bad as any of them. He could have pushed harder, but I think it would have lost him his popularity. He’s smart enough to know that. But I think he really bought the dream. He wouldn’t want to admit it, but I think it’s really been eating at him the last five or six years, knowing that we could be trying for something better and we aren’t.”

She opened the hatch to the suit room and started down the line of Rigid Experimental suits, looking for her favorite. From the corner of her eye she saw Kane peel off his hipari and clumsily stuff it into one of the lockers. She’d seen the same awkwardness when he’d undressed in her bedroom, and she suddenly understood that he was hiding something in the jacket.A weapon? she wondered.What in God’s name for, if he had no idea of what was happening?

To hell with it, she thought. Let Curtis sort it out.

But the idea terrified her nonetheless. If it was a handgun, it was a threat to all of them, a lighted match in a room flooded with oxygen, where even steel would burn. Only a fool, or a lunatic, would have one. She was afraid Kane might be a little of both.

Blok came in while she was helping Kane into his suit. He stared at them for a second or two, his eyes half closed in what Molly thought of as his “inscrutable Russian” look.Then he introduced himself to Kane.

“So,” he said.“What should I expect from my former countrymen?” he asked.“Rumor has it the Supreme Soviet is no more.”

Molly felt protective toward Kane, responsible, at least, for her attraction to him. She tried to will him into politeness, if only for her sake.

“To be honest,” Kane said affably,“we don’t hear much.The government went under, some kind of Army coup.And then the Army just kind of went to pieces.The Kazakhs against the Uzbeks against the Byelorussians and so on.”

“Tipichno,” Blok said.“Typical. Naturally the Army had to get rid of the kgb, so when the Army went there was nothing.”

“Just the obshchestvi, like Aeroflot, and a few of the stronger labor unions, the steelworkers and the miners.And they ended up incorporating.”

“Ah,” Blok said.“How Russians love a purge. Chistka, they call it.The cleaning. Out with socialism, the God that failed! In with western corporations! Bluejeans! Rock and roll!” He seemed genuinely happy, his irony buried so deeply that it, or any of his other true political feelings, would never betray him.

She twisted the clumsy, oblong helmet of her suit into place and switched on the plss.The suit had an external microphone and speaker that allowed her a direct link to the outside world; she used the speaker to tell Blok and Kane to hurry.

As she stood outside, watching the growing point of brightness in the sky, she found herself impatient to get the spacecraft on the ground, to get the last of the waiting over with. Once I know it all, she thought, once all the bad news is in, then we can decide what to do about it.

The Russian ship, visible only as a shadowy sphere-and-cylinder through the dust, hovered longer than it had to, touching down as gently as a pebble on a river bottom.And why not? Molly thought.They’d been perfecting their soft landings while the US was still dropping their Geminis and Apollos in the ocean—even if some of those landings had been blatant fiascos, like the Voskhod-2 mission where Leonov and Belyayev sat all night in their dead spacecraft, two thousand miles off course, fighting wolves and snow.

As the dust settled, Molly could make out the hideous pale green of the ship’s hull—“landlord green” Blok had once called it—and see where the cccp arid red rectangle had been clumsily painted out and replaced with the Aeroflot logo.The paint had blistered and flaked so badly in the heat of reentry that most of the lettering was gone.

Kane, beside her, was visibly unsteady. His ragged breathing hissed through the comm channel like a distant waterfall. He should be in sickbay, she thought, but there was no time to do anything for him now.

The hatch of the lander swung open.

Blok and two of the others ran forward to help. Molly watched as the first of the white-suited figures climbed down the ladder, and Blok reached a hand to help.The figure rested its weight on Blok’s shoulder, nodded, and walked away without help.

A second cosmonaut came out of the hatch and started down the ladder,then did something that Molly found odd.The Russian shut the hatch and punched a series of numbers into a ten-key pad in a recessed panel.

Locking it? Molly thought.What were they afraid of, thieves? She didn’t like the implied mistrust and secrecy.Was there some kind of weapon on the ship that they needed to protect?

“Zdravstvuyte, tovarishch—” Blok said as the Russian reached the ground, but his arm was pushed away.The figure straightened and stood on its own; glancing first at the crowd near the airlock, then once again at Blok.

“Hello, Blok,” said a woman’s voice, her English flavored with a sort of dry, European rasp.

“Colonel Mayakenska?” Blok seemed awed, even a little frightened. Molly recognized the name; Mayakenska had been one of the higher-ups in the Institute for Medium Machine Building, the Russian equivalent of nasa, but the Soviets had managed to keep her exact position obscured by disinformation.

“So you haven’t forgotten me.”

“Of course not, how could—”

She waved him silent.“I’m afraid it’s only Mademoiselle Mayakenska now.” She caught up with her fellow cosmonaut, and the two of them walked away from the ship with their heads up, their steps even and nearly in rhythm.

Molly knew the effort it cost them to put on such a show of strength, and it made her uncomfortable. She also didn’t like the fact that Mayakenska insisted on speaking English, an attitude that struck her as both condescending and overly theatrical.

Blok introduced her to Mayakenska, and Mayakenska in turn introduced Valentin, the other crewman. Neither of them offered to shake hands, and Molly contented herself with a formal nod to each of them, a gesture nearly imperceptible outside her rx suit.

“Are you in command, then?” Mayakenska asked, and the choice of words and the tone told her that this was as bad as it could be, that this was where the end truly began.

“My husband is,”she said.A cold lump lay in her stomach;she suddenly hated the inhuman taste of the compressed air she breathed. “If you’ll come inside—”

The airlock door opened behind her and she heard Curtis’s voice. “Okay, Molly, I’ve got it.” He stepped out and stood in front of the Russians, blocking, as if by accident, their way into the dome.“My name is Curtis,”he said.“I’m governor here.Welcome to Frontera Base.”

Kane came back to life. He shifted away from her, legs spread, and through the tinted visor of his helmet she could see his black eyes focus on Curtis.

Christ, she thought, I want away from here. She tried to visualize herself in a sleek ship, headed out toward Titan, Mars shrinking to a point-source in the screens, the stars closing in around her. It was a vision that had eased her before, but now she could no longer believe in it.Three heavy cables were looped over the fins of the ship, dragging it back, and on the ends of the cables were Curtis, Kane, and Mayakenska.

“We have a good deal to talk about,” Mayakenska said.The light was wrong for Molly to see into Curtis’s visor but she could imagine how sexy he would find the Russian’s voice, imagine the slow, predatory smile spreading across his face.

“I’m sure we do,” he said.“Blok will see to whatever you need for the moment—food, a change of clothes, whatever—and we’ll meet a little later at the Center. Blok will show you.”

And that, Molly thought, is what he does so well: strut, posture, and maneuver. I would only have tried to be polite.

Curtis stood aside and let Blok and the two Russians go through the lock first.

“Kane,” Curtis said as the door hissed shut. Molly realized Curtis had switched over to the external speaker on his suit, cutting the Russians out of the circuit. She snapped her own switch to ext and saw Kane and the three others do the same.“I see you’re up and around.”

The other three, she suddenly realized, were all Curtis’s people.

“What happened to Dian?” Kane said.

“Dian?” Molly said.“Curtis, what’s he talking about?”

“I don’t have the foggiest notion,” Curtis said.

“You killed her,” Kane said.‘‘You pumped the air out of her house and let her hemorrhage her lungs all over the walls and floor. Because you were afraid she was going to talk to me about something.”

“Oh Jesus,” Molly said.The edges of her helmet seemed to be closing down into a tunnel, as if she were accelerating away at some phenom

enal speed.

“Why was that, Curtis? What is it you’re trying to hide?”

“You’re obviously upset,” Curtis said.“Let’s go inside and we’ll get you some help.”

“Curtis.” Molly’s voice sounded distant and faint to her own ears; she still seemed to be falling away from the dome, from Kane, from her husband, even though she could see that she’d hardly moved at all.“Is. Dian. Dead.”

“I doubt it, sweetheart. I don’t think Kane is in any condition to tell what’s real at the moment.”

“Hanai saw it,” Kane said.“She’s one of yours.Takahashi, too. For Christ’s sake, man, this isn’t New York.You can’t just throw the body in some alley and pretend it didn’t happen.”

“Inside,” Curtis said. Molly saw, numbly, that the airlock telltale had flashed green. Curtis was in first, followed by Kane.As soon as she was through the door Molly slapped the mushroom-shaped button to seal them in, isolating Curtis from his henchmen.The gesture was thoughtless, impulsive, but Curtis turned on her in a rage.

“You traitorous little bitch,” he said, or at least that seemed to be the gist of it. He was still patched through ext and his voice was lost in the roar of compressed air.

Kane pulled his helmet off.The lock was small, less than a meter and a half on a side, and one elbow thumped against the plating of Molly’s suit. He’s crazy, she thought. His eyes were ringed with purple so dark the skin appeared contused, and a wide, white band of sclera showed under his irises.

He shifted nervously from one foot to the other until the inner door opened, and then he shoved past Curtis and ducked through the hatchway. Molly took her own helmet off and followed him, with Curtis right behind her.

The Russians were still getting out of their gear; Blok was handing them oxygen masks and explaining how to use them. Molly began to strip off the clumsy rx suit, her back to the airlock.When she turned around, orange padded cape in hand, she saw Kane standing by the controls, the inner door locked open, the lower half of his body still armored in jointed beige plastic.

“Don’t push it, Kane,” Curtis said.“Shut the door and let the others in.” He hung his suit on the wall and belted on a pair of slacks. Blok, glancing nervously at Kane, hurried the Russians out into the dome.

“Not until I get some answers,” Kane said. Molly suddenly remembered the bundle Kane had hidden in one of the lockers.The thought grew into a bright spot of panic. Could Kane have murdered Dian? Was he going to start shooting now, punching holes through this fragile box of air? She took a small, sideways step toward the locker.

“What am I supposed to tell you?” Curtis said.“We’ve found the lost city of Mars, and we’ve got the Martians in an all-night poker game in a tool shed somewhere? That all those things that look like glaciers up there on Arsia Mons are really single crystal silicon ribbons? What do you want to hear?”

“Just the truth. Everybody’s been lying to me since I got involved in this fucking mission and I’m sick of it!” He threw his helmet aside and Molly saw him wince at the answering pain in his ribs.The helmet bounced off the wall of lockers with a booming crash and buried itself in the rack of suits.

“You stupid little punk,” Curtis said.

Kane moved on him.

Turn around, Molly told herself.Walk away.You don’t want to see this, don’t want to have to deal with any more of this macho bullshit. But she couldn’t make herself go.

Kane’s attack was oriental, his legs bent and center of gravity low, his body twisting and turning as he covered the distance between Curtis and himself in two long strides. Even to Molly’s inexperienced eyes he looked weak, off-balance, and she was surprised when he feinted a spin kick, turned in close, and caught Curtis with a fist under the heart.

Curtis stepped back, hurt and out of breath, but he was ready when Kane came at him again. He reached overhead for the long metal bar of the suit rack, levered himself into the air and drove both legs at Kane’s injured chest, spilling a dozen suits off their hangers.

Kane saw it coming and tried to cover up, succeeded only in getting his own fists and elbows driven into his face and stomach. Curtis stepped away long enough to slam the inner door of the airlock and to make sure the light above it clicked to red.Then he finished Kane with a wide, looping punch that caught him just inside the cheekbone and stretched him across the floor.

Molly had no way of knowing how much more damage had been done to Kane’s ribs. He was alive, and lucky for that much; what had he thought he was going to prove?

“You did kill her, didn’t you?” Molly said to Curtis.“She must have been the leak you were talking about. She told Morgan about the new physics, and so you killed her.”

“Don’t start, Molly.”

“Start? Me, start? Dian was my friend. She was part of the project, she was integral, you asshole.You kill her and then you tell me not to start?”

“This is more trouble than you can handle, Molly. I sincerely advise you to butt out of this.”

“Are you threatening me? Are you threatening me, you son of a bitch? Are you going to kill me next?”

The airlock light flashed green in her peripheral vision and the rest of Curtis’s people came through. One of them went to Kane’s body and dumped him out of the lower half of his suit, leaving him lying on the rough concrete in his black drawstring trousers.A second moved next to Curtis, and a third stayed by the door.

Like little robots, Molly thought. Her hands shook with rage and frustration. It’s out of control, she thought.There’s not a thing I can do to stop it.

“What about this one?” asked the woman standing over Kane.

“Put him in Little Juarez,” Curtis said.“Lock him in and dope him to the gills, I don’t care with what. Something to keep him out of the way until I make up my mind about him.”

Little Juarez, Molly thought. So that’s what he calls it, his little pleasure cabin. How demeaning. Did he tell all his conquests about the nickname? Had he told Lena, that morning?

He crossed the room to stand in front of her, massaging his right hand with his left.

“Don’t touch me,” she said quietly.

“I’m not going to,” Curtis said.“I’m just going to ask you to do what I tell you, just for now.At least until we find out what the Russian position is. Okay? Can you handle that? Because everything is falling apart right now and my hands are full.”

“You know what they want.They want the fucking project, same as Morgan does.”

“And I’m not going to give it to them. Okay? That’s what we both want, it’s what we both know is right. So all you have to do is walk in and sit down at the table with me and listen to what the Russians have to say. Okay?”

“Okay,” Molly said, looking away from the pained sincerity on his face.“Okay.”

He’d been through it all those last nights in Houston. For nine months he’d locked himself away from the rest of the crew and stared at the possibilities, testing himself against them, the way a suicide would test the bite of the razor on his hands.

But now, now that he had committed himself, Reese was afraid.

Verb had left with the diskette. It had taken her only a few seconds with her eyes closed to tell him that Barnard’s Star would be in optimum position for the run at nine that night. Her freakish abilities had begun to frighten him more than they impressed him, provoking some kind of instinctive xenophobia.

“Be there by eight-thirty or so,” she told him, and gave him directions to the cave. Had she sensed his distaste? Did it matter? His sudden desire to hug her was as selfish and guilt-ridden as it was artificial. He suppressed it and nodded instead.

“Thank you,” he said.

“Sure.”

Molly would want him to report back to sickbay; Curtis would be even less happy about his wandering around without a watchdog.And then, like the bolt of a rifle sliding home, came the thought: this is it. These are the last hours I’m going to have with other human beings, maybe the last, period.

I ought to get laid, he thought, anyway. But he recognized the impulse as no more than a galvanic response, the frog’s leg of his sexuality twitching under the applied current of some leftover, obsolete sensibilities.

His second thought was that he needed a drink.

He started back toward the Center, depressed by the uniformity and orderliness of the houses around him. In the first season under the dome, nicknames and hand-painted signs had proliferated:“Tharsis Hilton” for the Center,“South Hell” for the unheated garages,“the Blister” for the dome itself. Now, in spite of the red-and-blue neon “Frontera Bar and Grille” sign outside the north entrance to the Center, Reese sensed that things had changed. Curtis’s regime reflected the man’s personal sterility and lack of humor. Reese had seen the cameras that tracked him as he walked, the sort of obsessive power icons that became venerated when true power was slipping away.

He went in under the glowing sign and turned left into the wardroom. In the tradition of American bars, the lighting was minimal, despite the fact that it was barely after noon. He’d brought his Mars Identification and Credit Authority with him from Earth on a sentimental impulse; the mica card fit into a slot on the far wall and allowed Reese to select a gimlet from the menu.A sentimental drink, he thought, appropriate to the occasion.

As his eyes adjusted he noticed someone else in the room.“Hello?” he said.

“You’re Reese, aren’t you?” The voice belonged to a young woman, Asian, slim, attractive.

“That’s right.”

“Hanai. Do you want to sit down?” She was clearly upset about something; she was on her third drink, and she still had to steady the glass with both hands.

He took his drink and card and sat down at her table.The room was antiseptic as a hospital automat. He could remember when the walls had been covered with handwritten messages: want ads, poems, kids’ art work. Now, from what he’d seen, people did their drinking at home, sometimes even in the fields outside, pulling their masks just far enough from their faces to accommodate the neck of a bottle or the end of a straw.

“Shouldn’t you be with somebody?” Hanai asked.

For an instant Reese thought she was propositioning him, then understood she was talking about security.“Not me,” he said.“I used to live here.” He wished for a second that she had been coming on to him. Her lips were shallow but exquisitely formed, and he watched with longing as they moved softly against the edge of her glass.

Stop it, he told himself.You’re just trying to bail out, to load yourself down with some low-grade sexual karma so you won’t go through the gate.

“Something’s wrong,” he said to her.“Do you want to talk about it?”

She shook her head.Then, as if changing the subject, she said,“The Russian ship is landing. Did you know?”

“Russian ship?”

“The one from Earth. It’s probably already here. I’ll be on duty again tonight because of it, I shouldn’t be drinking.” She made no move to put the glass down.

Already here, Reese thought. Of course.That was why Morgan had left him so little time. It was no vague threat but an actual mission, one that Morgan had known about even then.

“Do you know what they want?” he asked Hanai,

She shook her head.“It’s funny.We went so long, thinking we would never see anybody from Earth again. Now all of a sudden you’re all over the place, and we realize we really didn’t miss you at all.You know? Only now it’s too late.”

Reese downed the gimlet, the sour lime juice burning more than the gin.“Are they taking them to sickbay?” he asked, standing up.

“Sickbay’s full. I don’t know what they’re doing with them.” Her eyes stared down into her glass, telling Reese she didn’t particularly care, either.

He reached across the table and gently touched her hair. She jerked her head away, startled. Reese wanted to console her somehow, but all he could find to say was,“I’m sorry.”

He turned left on his way out, intending to cut through the main dining hall to sickbay. Instead he heard familiar voices from one of the meeting rooms off the hallway.The door was open and he could see Molly and Curtis at the far side of the room, their backs toward him. Across the table from them sat three others: Blok, the senior survivor of the Marsgrad disaster, and another woman and man.The woman saw Reese and stood up.

“Reese! Come over here.”

He stood behind Molly and reached across the table to shake her hand.“Colonel Mayakenska.They finally let you fly one.” He’d only met her in person once before, but her photograph was well known at nasa. She was a well preserved fifty, tall and thin, each small muscle perfectly defined. She had been a body builder, Reese remembered, and evidently she’d kept it up. Even her face showed the effects of exercise, her cheeks hollow and her chin firm, despite the months of free-fall. Her brown, Mongol eyes had only a trace of puffiness and she’d left her khaki-colored hair long enough to curl under her chin.

It was intimidating, Reese thought, to have somebody get off a spacecraft looking that good. He had no doubt she’d intended it just that way.

“Why don’t you sit with us?” she said.“What we’re talking about concerns you, too.”

Reese sat next to Molly, trying to pick up the mood of the table. Mayakenska exuded calm authority; Curtis and Molly seemed withdrawn and frightened, waiting for some figurative axe to fall. Blok was openly nervous, and Reese could feel the unspoken pressure the Russians were exerting on his loyalties.

“I don’t see any need to talk around the edges of this thing,” Mayakenska said.“We know of your discoveries, at least some of them. Unfortunately, your political position is somewhat...tenuous. Neither the US nor the Soviet Union, um, I believe the exact language was, ‘makes, or recognizes any claims’ on other planets of the solar system. Since the population here is a mixture of Russian, Japanese and American—”

Curtis cleared his throat.“Is there a point to this?”

“These discoveries,” Mayakenska went on,“are clearly the property of all humankind.Therefore we have come to participate in a joint endeavor to develop and exploit this new technology.”

“So,” Curtis said,“you’re a scientific expedition, then.”

“In a manner of speaking, yes.”

“And you thought you’d just drop in, like this was some kind of Video Expo, and take a look at the new gear? Come on. Let’s just move on along to the next tissue of lies.”

“Do I understand,” Mayakenska said,“that you are refusing to share your knowledge?”

“One,” Curtis said,“I don’t even know what knowledge it is that you’re so eager to get your hands on, and two—”

“You know perfectly well what it is,” Mayakenska said.“Even Reese knows, don’t you Reese?”

“Two,” Curtis said, nearly shouting now,“nobody asked you here. Where were you when your own people were hiking across the Sinai Planum in shuttle suits, for Christ’s sake? Where were you when we were trying to squeeze nitrogen out of a vacuum? Sorry, Mayakenska, I don’t buy it. I can’t believe for an instant you thought I would buy it.”

“I don’t suppose I did,” Mayakenska said.“Okay, let’s try it this way.” She brought her wrist up dramatically and looked at her watch.“We all have these nice Seikos that keep time in sols rather than days.” Reese had one himself; the electronics of the watch allocated the extra 7 minutes of the Martian day over a 24-hour period, lengthening each second by a factor of .0257.“Right now mine says it’s 13:52 and a few seconds. Our ship is in synchronous orbit overhead, in continuous radio contact with us.They’re expecting to get a coded signal from us each hour. If they don’t get it, or if we don’t send another, very specific coded signal tonight at midnight, they’re going to open up with a narrow-beam heat laser. If you want a demonstration we can set one up for you.”

She leaned back in her chair.The plastic creaked. Reese could hear his own breathing.

He felt his fear as a hollow ache near his stomach, almost like hunger, except that it was vibrating, and the vibration was moving into his hands.

When his brain began to function again, his first thought was, I was right, I was right to find a way out of this.This is a sickness, and now that there aren’t any countries to blow each other up, the corporations have caught it and now they’re going to finish the job.

Mayakenska stood up.“You’ll need some time. Blok tells me there’s an empty house, S-23.We’ll be there when you’re ready to talk about this.”

For a second Blok was the focus of Curtis’s hatred, and Reese wondered that the weight of it didn’t crush him flat.Then Blok got jerkily to his feet and followed Mayakenska and her silent countryman out of the room.

Molly’s head sank onto her folded arms.“It’s all over,” she said, rubbing her forehead against the spherical bones of her wrist.“It’s finished. Let them have the damned thing. It’s not worth it.”

“Right,” Curtis said, barely louder than a whisper.Against the darkness of his five o’clock shadow, his puffy lips were turning up at the ends.A stranger, Reese thought, might innocently mistake that look for a smile.“Then they’ll just go away and leave us alone. Right? Sure they will.” His arm blurred as he spun around and hurled the chair next to him the length of the room. It slid across a tabletop and banged into the wall with maniac force.The violence of it had brought him to his feet, but only a tiny tic in his left eye betrayed his emotions.“You just bet they will,” he said in the same even tone, and then he walked away.

“I’m sorry,” Reese said to Molly.

“I know you are,” she said. She sat up, brushed ineffectually at the tangles in her hair.There were fine, brittle lines of white now, Reese noticed, in the straw-colored mass.“It wasn’t your idea. Maybe it wasn’t anybody’s idea. Maybe it’s just the semiotics, you know? Once Verb built the machine, it changed our own ways of thinking about it.”

“You can look at it that way,” Reese said.“If it’s easier.”

“I don’t think it is.” She put her hands in her lap, as if they needed protective custody.“It’s Curtis I’m worried about. He’s not just going to lie down, and...” She trailed off into a shrug.

“Fight him, then,” Reese said, feeling like a hypocrite.“You’ve fought for things before.You fought to get a place on the colony ships.”

“Yeah, right.And look how that ended up.”

“Would you rather have been stuck on Earth? Maybe gotten killed in the riots? Or spent three years in the breadlines like Lena did, because there wasn’t any work?”

“Okay,” she said, letting her head fall back, taking in a noisy breath. “Things are tough all over.And what am I talking to you for, anyway? You’re the enemy too.”

“I’m not the enemy.”

“Aren’t you? Then what are you here for?”

“For myself,” Reese said.“I’m neutral. I’m a bystander.”

“There aren’t any bystanders,” Molly said.“What was it your father used to say? ‘If you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem?’”

“That was a long time ago.”

“I guess it was.”

Reese started for the door.

“Reese?” She was standing up, arms at her sides.

He walked back to her and she put her arms around his chest.“You’re getting fat,” she said.

“I’m getting old.”

“I’m sorry. I’m sorry for what I said. I guess...I guess I just needed somebody to tell me everything’s going to be all right. It’s a father’s job, you know.”

Reese smoothed back her hair.

“Damn you,” she said.“Couldn’t you lie about it? Just this once?”

Leaving Blok and Valentin in the kitchen, Mayakenska closed herself in the rear bedroom and unfolded her keyboard.

The few pieces of yellow plastic furniture in the house were coated with dust.The air, newly pumped in on Blok’s instructions, had the metallic tang of the chemistry labs at the university.The keyboard hung over both sides of the flimsy desk, and she had to perch on a corner of the bed to play.

Her brief spasms of guilt had given way to a sense of mortality. If the dome were destroyed, she would die with it, probably in a flash of light and pain as an expanding embolus of nitrogen tore out a piece of her brain.Was that an excuse for her part in it?

She plugged in her headphones and tried to capture the cool discipline of Brubeck’s “Picking Up Sticks.”

A perfect world would not demand such decisions; but then, a perfect world would have given her longer fingers, a better ear, an earlier start, would have made her a real pianist instead of a clumsy imposter.

When the second revolution came to Russia, Mayakenska had been in bed with Valentin, her cosmonaut lover. She had brought him to her Zhukovka dacha for the weekend, despite gossip that she was taking advantage of her position to prey on the young, politically susceptible men of the space program she controlled.

The gossip failed to annoy her.There was nothing so sincere, she believed, as a fully erect penis.

The first time the phone rang she was preoccupied by the delicious anguish of Valentin’s teeth on her nipple.When it rang a second time, waking Valentin from a vodka stupor, she knew it had to be serious. Hardly anyone used the phone in Soviet Russia; because it was so little used, it was low on the government’s priority for repairs, perpetuating a vicious circle.

She pushed Valentin aside and got to the phone by the fourth ring. “Allo?” she said, and a male voice at the other end echoed her,“Allo?’

Fear of telephones, Mayakenska thought, will one day destroy us. “This is Mayakenska,” she said tiredly.“What do you want?”

“Petrov here,” the voice said.“Listen, I thought you should know. Everything is...it’s crazy here. Novikov is dead.”

“Dead?” she repeated. He’d been premier less than three weeks, not even long enough to solidify his power.“Assassinated?”

“Arrested.”

“You’ve got to be joking.Arrested by whom?”

“The Army. He was charged with sedition and, uh,‘shot while trying to escape’ or something.We think there was meant to be a trial and somebody just screwed it up. Everything’s changing so fast.”

“What about the Cheka?” Mayakenska asked. It was unthinkable that the kgb could have allowed Novikov to be taken so easily.

“Don’t you get it? There is no more Cheka. The Army is in.The Party is out. Everything is upside down. I just wanted you to know. Be ready for anything.” The line went dead.

Outside the open window she could see a jay, shifting from one leg to the other on a narrow branch. She could smell pine needles and spring grasses and the cool dampness of the Moscow River, beyond the edge of the woods.

And yet, she thought, less than 40 kilometers away, the entire world is coming apart.

Just the day before she had been reading an article on Novikov in Literaturka. The illustration showed Novikov’s bald head and hollow cheeks defaced by a staff artist, with Stalinesque eyebrows, mustache, and monolithic hair crudely penciled in.The masses, Literaturka said, remembered Stalin only as the krepki khozyain, the firm master who brought discipline to the young and efficiency to the factories. Novikov had first called attention to himself with his zeal in exceeding the government’s Plan, in one case doubling December production in his entire district.

The Army had been alarmed by his belligerence toward China, although the quantum leaps the Chinese had taken in biotechnology had frightened and embarrassed all the world powers. Literaturka had made cautious references to Stalin’s decimation of the military high command; the censors had passed them, probably because Novikov appreciated the importance of a well-placed threat.

And so, Mayakenska thought, forcing a glass of hot tea into Valentin’s hand, the Army had taken Novikov seriously. Between Chinese threats of aggression in North Africa and the ongoing collapse of the Americans, there were ample opportunities for a war, but it was clearly a war the Army did not want to fight. Nothing had been said in the press about the mass desertions, mutinies, and racial tensions, but they were common knowledge among the military elite, even for someone like Mayakenska, whose rank was purely honorary.

She had no way of judging what the news would mean to her career, but it would doubtless mean shortages and total confusion in her personal life.

She hurried Valentin into his clothes, keeping the keys to his Zhiguli for herself. She forced herself not to hurry as she led Valentin, cursing and befuddled, out to the car; forced herself not to spray gravel as she pulled out of the driveway.

At the cinderblock village store, called the Krushchev store as long as Mayakenska could remember, the black Zils and Zhigulis already filled the parking lot.The store was reserved for the nomenklatura, and access to information was the most valued privilege of the elite.

I should have answered the phone, she thought, the first time it rang.

In the end she did come away with some cheese, bread, and canned meat, but the news she’d learned was more important than steaks or vegetables.

“Have you heard the latest?” someone she knew only vaguely asked her as they waited in the long queue at the cashier.

“Which latest?”

“The mutinies.” It was the first time Mayakenska had seen him in anything but a dark suit and tie. Rumor had it he was highly placed in the Cheka, and his sudden casual clothing seemed to confirm it.“All the non-Russians—the Uzbeks, the Yakuts, the Lithuanians, draftees, all of them—they’re refusing to fight.”

Back in the car, Mayakenska let her head fall forward onto the wheel, unwilling even to start the motor until she could make a decision.

“What’s going on?”Valentin asked.

“It’s over,” she said.“It’s all over.All that’s left is to save what we can. Whatever we think is important enough.” That put it in focus for her. She turned east, toward Moscow.

“Where are you going? Are you crazy? Aren’t you going back to the dacha?”

“No time,” Mayakenska said.“We’re going to Zvezdagrad.”

“And we’re going to drive there? You are crazy.” The Russian secret launch complex was in Kazakhstan, thousands of kilometers from Moscow.

“No,” Mayakenska said.“We take a helicopter from Kaliningrad.”

“That’s on the other side of Moscow.We don’t know how bad it is in the city.They could be rioting there.”

In Valentin’s groping for excuses she saw the weakness of the age. It was the legacy of the west, this loss of moral certainty. Mayakenska had never understood it or had any patience with it. For her the difficulty lay in finding the correct path to follow. Once the choice was made, the required actions were mindless and simple.What difference did a little hardship make, if hardship was what was required?

“Rioting?” she teased him.“Are you implying the masses are not happy with the socialist state?”

Valentin stared at her for an instant with bloodshot eyes, then turned away to watch the thick pine forest whip past the car.“That’s really funny,” he said, eventually.“Sometimes you really make me laugh.”

He was married, Mayakenska suddenly remembered. No children, she was fairly sure, and he’d never mentioned his wife, but it was possible he was concerned for her.

“I can let you off in the city,” she told him,“if you want. Otherwise I’ll go around, stay off the highways.”

He was silent so long she thought he might not have heard her at all. Then, finally, he shook his head.“Go on. I’m with you.”

Once they left the main highway, they were confined to dirt and gravel roads.A month earlier they would have been axle-deep in red mud, but spring was giving way to summer, the roads were dry, and the entire countryside was in flower.This is what it’s like, Mayakenska thought, to truly be Russian; even now, with chaos closing in, she wanted to stop the car and bury her face in the sweet, fertile earth of rodina, Mother Russia. It was a love that never conflicted with her other single greatest desire: to touch the red soil of Russia’s furthest colony,

She was too valuable, the Party had told her, to be risked in the cosmonaut program.There were simply not enough high-ranking women to serve as examples of the Party’s mythical lack of sexism, and far too many disasters in space.They didn’t care that the promise of Mars had lured her into the Army from her engineering career in the first place; they assumed a promotion and authority over the program would be enough.

What the Party didn’t know was that she had trained alongside the cosmonauts, studied all their textbooks, sat through all their lectures, sculpted her body into better condition than those of women half her age. It brought her the respect of her students, and when her moment came, she knew she would be ready.

She never got the chance. By the time the Americans sent their last expedition to shut down the Frontera base, the Soviet Union was overextended at home. Crop failures and famine were more important than prestige in space, and Marsgrad was left to find its own way.

That had been five years ago. Mayakenska had not even heard of the Marsgrad fire from her own people, but read about it in the New York Times. Her friends, cosmonauts she had trained, had been abandoned there; she had no way of knowing which of them had survived the fire and made it to the American base. Not that it mattered, for surely the Americans were dead now as well.

So why was Zvezdagrad so important to her? It was a question she hardly needed to ask herself.Without Zvezdagrad, Russia would not go into space again, not within her lifetime.And if she didn’t save it, no one would.

She parked the Zhiguli outside Mission Control in Kaliningrad as the sun was beginning to set.The base was an anthill that had been kicked to pieces: abandoned vehicles blocked the streets, civilians and soldiers swarmed over the grounds without apparent purpose. Holding her embossed red work pass in front of her, Mayakenska began shouting orders to anyone who would listen.Within minutes she had the base sealed off; by the time it was fully dark she and Valentin were on a helicopter headed for Tyuratam. On her instructions the big Kama trucks were already carrying every piece of space hardware she had been able to locate toward the Central Asian steppes.

If nothing else, she thought, watching the endless miles of empty land unroll into the night, she had gained an appreciation of the way Novikov had risen so quickly.The workers at Kaliningrad, even the officers, had seemed absurdly grateful for any voice of authority.The dissidents who wanted a truly democratic society in Russia had no idea of the enormity of what they were asking.

“So,”Valentin said, his blond good looks even more wasted and sickly-looking in the green light of the control panel,“now we will have Zvezdagrad.What are we going to do with it?”

“Hold it,” Mayakenska said.“Hold it and wait.”

She held Zvezdagrad for seven months, the longest seven months of her life. She took cows and goats and chickens from the nearby village of Tyuratam at gunpoint, then offered the villagers sanctuary within her walls.They refused, of course; from the outside the space center looked depressingly like a Gulag, with its miles of barbed wire and its grim cinderblock buildings.

Most of the villagers died a few weeks later when the People’s Independent Army of Kazakhstan swept through the steppes like a modern Mongol horde, on the backs of jeeps and dune buggies and balloon-tired motorcycles, armed with Kalishnikov machine guns and towing what appeared to be a tactical nuclear ground-to-ground missile.

Mayakenska let them pass.They in turn seemed to feel the center wasn’t worth the trouble of getting past the fortifications.The surviving villagers didn’t agree.They attacked Zvezdagrad with the puny weapons they had available, and Mayakenska saw no way to reason with them. She ordered her people to fire on them, and they lived with the stench of decaying bodies for the next two weeks.

The radio, when it worked, brought news of the capital.The chekists had been the first to try to fill the power vacuum.While their communication lines were second to none, the apex of their power structure had been amputated in the Army coup.Without experienced leadership, their authority never solidified. Looters began shooting anyone in kgb gray uniforms, and the rape of Moscow went on.

In the end it was the unions that began to organize the pieces. Under the old order they had been just another arm of the state, responsible for morale and unemployment benefits, but when the first cases of cholera appeared on the streets, they extended their responsibilities. Mayakenska began to hear words like “corporate infrastructure” and “bottom line” on the radio. Using the zaibatsus and the multinationals for models, the unions put together a new, decentralized society.

On New Year’s Eve she put the traditional three pieces of paper under her pillow and went to sleep, alone, sober, and aching with hunger. In the morning she pulled out one of the pieces, unfolded it, saw the words “Good Year.”

“Please,” she said, sitting on the edge of the bed, glad there was no one to see her crying.“Please.”

She sent a cable to the old Aeroflot address in Moscow that after-noon.Within a week, the first company representatives had flown out to see what could be done with several square kilometers of vintage space hardware. Mayakenska was awarded the honorary rank of vice president, and all her loyal supporters were hired by the company.

“There is one condition,” she said, staring at the fine, meaningless print of the “contract” they wanted her to sign.“If there is another mission to Mars, I will be on it.”

“No problem,” said one of the other vice presidents. He was western educated, and wore glasses with colored frames, a silk shirt and tie, and dzhinsi pants.

“Write it down,” she said.“Write it in your contract.”

The company representatives looked at each other, and then they shrugged.The vice president with the colored glasses amended the contract and Mayakenska signed it and they all shook hands.And then, because they were Russians, the vodka bottle finally appeared and they drank to the dawn of a new age.

They seemed to expect her to retire to her dacha and her pension, but instead she brought her cosmonauts back to Kaliningrad and the training facilities at Zvezdny Gorodok. For three years. she put up with the bemused acceptance of her new superiors. She would have put up with it for another ten, but she didn’t have to.Word had come from one of the moles buried deep within Pulsystems of the incredible discoveries at Frontera base.

“We are ready,” she told her board of directors, and less than three months later she was back at Zvezdagrad, strapped into a modified Soyuz, pointed at Mars.

For Mayakenska, history was the irrelevant process by which a present moment was constructed. By extension, the present was no more than a tool for shaping the future.And this, she told herself, thinking of the laser orbiting over her head, is what I have to do.

She shifted into the slow arpeggios of Max Middleton’s solo from “Diamond Dust.” From countless listenings she could recreate the string section in her mind, lacing their minor chords through the notes of the piano. Jazz music, for Mayakenska, was the only thing of value ever to come from the moral and spiritual desert of American culture. It was a music untainted by capitalist values, at least the best of it was, played only for the joy of the music itself.

The piece worked itself to the finish, climbing to the final B above high C. She loved that note, the way it floated above the rest of the music,the sense of completion it gave to the whole.At last she brought her hands away, unplugged the headphones, and folded the keyboard again.

She’d slept well before the landing, in order to be strong and alert, and though the Martian gravity had tired her she could not imagine trying to sleep again. Still not reconciled? she wondered. Still waiting to find that perfect note, the one that would make sense of this undeniably brutal and imperialistic mission?

After nine months she had been unable to find any answers.The transport device and, more importantly, the antimatter generator, must not become the exclusive property of Pulsystems, It would mean not only the end of Aeroflot, but the end of Russia as any sort of world power.

There was a knock at the door and she said,“Come in.”

“Valentin is asleep,” Blok said.“Are you all right? Can I get you anything?”

They were questions, she thought, he should be asking himself. His eyes seemed to vibrate with nervousness.“Relax,” she said. “There’s nothing to worry about. I think Curtis will accept the political realities of his situation.”

This was her fault, she knew. She had played Curtis off against Blok at their meeting, polarizing him before he was truly ready to make a choice. But she needed him, needed an inside man to take the load off of herself and Valentin.

“Do you?” Blok said.“I’m not so sure.”

He had been one of her most difficult students, a true political, a Komsomol member since his teens, with high marks in leadership and poor physical condition. She had done well, she thought, toughened him up enough that he had survived.

“It’s out of our hands, in any case,” she told him. Blok nodded, started to turn away, and then she had a thought.“Just a second. If you really want to do something for me, you could. Stay and watch things for a few minutes.”

“Of course. Get some sleep.You must be worn out.”

“No,” she said,“I’m fine. I just want to...to go outside. Just for a couple of minutes. I don’t think anything’s going to come up, but if it does you can radio me.”

“Let me come with you.”

“No. I’ll be fine.” She reached for her radio and called the orbiter. “This is Mayakenska at 15 hundred hours. Code Dniepr. Repeat, code Dniepr.”

“Okay, we have you,” said Chaadayev, the command pilot.“How did they take it?”

“Not too well.What did you expect?”

“I guess I hadn’t really thought about it. Listen, you may be getting some weather down there. Everything’s gotten really hazy-looking

down to the south.”

“Any idea when it’s going to get here?”

“Are you kidding? I’m from Moscow. I don’t know anything about this shit. But it’s heading right for you and it seems to be moving pretty fast. Maybe in a few minutes.”

“Okay,” Mayakenska said.“We’ll call back in an hour.” She threw the radio on the bed and stood up.

“Be careful,” Blok said.“If that’s a sandstorm you don’t want to be out in it.”

She hugged him.“You always worried too much,” she said.

In the changing room she tried on one of the American rigid suits. It fit well, but didn’t seem as solid and trustworthy as the Soviet model. She strapped on a life support pack and cycled through the lock.

For the first minute or so, she was distracted by the unfamiliar suit, by the vertiginous pull of gravity, by the rasping sound of her own breath. She had to pick her way through the jetsam of the dome, the ice bags and abandoned science experiments and rows upon rows of solar collectors.

And then she reached the top of a low rise, and for the first time she could see a horizon that had no human mark on it, an expanse of orange sand and dark brown rock and hazy, pinkish sky. She sat in the dirt like a child and ran some of it through her gloved fingers.

“Hello, Mars,” she said.

The wind swirled around her, and tiny grains of sand began to ping against her helmet.

Kane dreamed of an ocean full of colors, crystalline turquoise over shallow sand, purple where the sluggish living rock of the reefs grew toward the sun, dark, cold blue over the depths.

Ahead was Mount Arganthon, its hollow peak veiled in thin sheets of cloud; off to port he could see the powdery soil and dark green brush of the Cianian coast.The wind was freshening, finally, now that his fifty oarsmen were exhausted and the sun was within a hand’s width of the horizon.A gust puffed out the single massive sail in the center of the penteconter, and he gave the command to ship oars.

They rode the breeze into the port of Mysia, rich smells of frying oil, ripe fruit, and mingled sweat and perfume drifting across the water of the harbor to meet them.They tied the Argo at the dock and climbed into the city by torchlight, the Mysians in crudely dyed chitons and pepla swarming around them, desperate for news.

Over dinner he stared hungrily at the dark-eyed woman across from him, steam from the charred sheep carcass in the center of the table rising between them.Afterwards, the grease from the meal still smearing his mouth, his nose full of her thick perfume, he plunged his swollen, aching penis into her, holding her wrists against the rocky soil of the hillside, her heavy breasts lolling in the night air, her linen clothes scattered behind them like the wake of the Argo, her mouth open in a silent scream of protest or perhaps even pleasure.

When he finished, he rocked back onto his knees, sniffing the air. Someone was moving, below, on the path that led to the village spring. He let his chiton fall over his loins and crept barefoot down the slope for a better look.

It was Hylas, Herakles’ lover, done up in full kosmetikos, hair and cheeks dyed red, face blanched, eyebrows painted in, his hair full of flowers. He carried a bronze pitcher over one shoulder.

Kane followed him, irritated that the boy was wandering around unarmed. Hylas was enough trouble as it was, stirring up the other men, afraid to brutalize his hands with an oar, toying with Herakles’ unstable emotions. But he was the price that went with Herakles’ services.

Kane stood behind a thicket while Hylas bent over the still surface of the water.The moon was high, and Kane could see that they were alone, but his calf muscles were jumping and the air smelled wrong, smelled like rain though the sky was clear.

The water of the spring began to stir.

Ripples Kane could have understood, but what he saw was the entire surface tilting and swaying.At the same time it began to glow, an oily sheen like glistening fat, but with rainbow colors melting and turning inside.The air began to hum and Kane felt the hairs on his legs and arms stand straight away from his body.The Gods, he thought.They’re moving.

Hylas disappeared.

“Hylas!” The scream came from Herakles, trampling the path with the thunder of an entire army.

Kane stepped out in front of him, said,“Reese, stop!” not knowing why he used the strange-sounding name.

Herakles knocked him aside.As he tumbled into the dirt, Kane saw Herakles circled with a light like the phantom fire that danced from the masts of ships.And then Herakles was gone.

The water shimmered and heaved, and before it went still again Kane saw the image of a cup, and a strange, curved sword, and finally the Fleece itself, the wool heavy with glittering particles of gold.

“Kane?”

The voice came from the spring, a woman’s voice, stirring something just out of the reach of his consciousness.

“Kane, snap out of it!”

He crawled toward the water, feeling the sand soften and pucker under him, light flooding his eyes, blinding him.

“Jesus, I thought I’d lost you for a moment there.What the hell happened to you?”

Kane focused, saw a woman with a dark, sculpted face looming over him. Fragments of the ancient sailor’s personality still clung to his own, making him feel drugged, dissociated from himself. Gradually he recognized Lena, remembered having brawled with Curtis in the airlock.

“Kane? Are you all right? Can you talk at all?”

He had trouble hearing her.The voices were filling all the unused spaces in his brain, had moved smoothly from the dream into this other reality with their echoing harmony.“What did you give me?” he asked, feeling a sudden wash of chemical energy shoot through his spine.

“Adrenogen,” Lena said. Kane nodded. He’d heard rumors of the stuff from his uncle’s chemists, a synthetic hormone that forced the body to produce massive quantities of adrenaline. He felt light-headed and barely in control of his emotions, alternately terrified, enraged, and moved nearly to tears by the music in his brain.

“You pulled me out of this,” he said.“Why? I thought you were with Curtis.”

“Yeah,” she said.“I was with him. He’s a psycho, Kane. Full of power—political, personal, sexual, you name it. But he’s hooked on it, and now his whole midway ride is starting to come apart on him.”

“The Russians,” Kane said, remembering.

“Yeah, the Russians.They’re going to laser this whole place into a junkyard at midnight.That’s like three hours from now. Maybe sooner, if somebody panics. It’s time for us to get the hell out of here.”

“No,” Kane said.

“Listen, man, there’s stuff you don’t know about.Your uncle did a number on your head. I’m not talking about brainwashing here, I mean some really serious shit, some kind of implant wetware that we don’t even know what it’s doing.”

“Implant,” Kane said.“Jesus.”

“Something about North Africa,Takahashi said.They had to put it in to get your brain to function at all, or something. He said they can swap programs in and out of it like changing cassettes.”

The sequences began to click into place for him: the years of stunted ambition, the phantom voices distracting him, the cryogenics briefcase with a new module to be installed, the subliminals to activate it, the headaches, the dreams, the music.“How long have you known about it?”

“Me? Just since last night. But Takahashi’s known all along, him and your uncle both.”

“Yeah, sure he would. But he’d have to. It’s just part of the Pattern, see?”

“See what?”

“My father died on the Gulf Freeway, an axle broke or something, and he went into a concrete embankment. I was seven, I was in the car, and I got thrown clear. I was wearing those Mexican sandals, huaraches, and one of them got blown away.When my uncle came to get me at the hospital, I was just wearing one sandal.”

Lena stared at him as if he were raving.

“Don’t you see?” Kane said.“That’s how Pelias was supposed to recognize the man that was going to kill him.Which was Jason. So Pelias sent him after the Fleece, thinking he would never make it back.”

“Greek mythology,” Lena said.“Do you know where you are? Do you understand what’s happening?”

“I’m on Mars.Where my uncle sent me to die. But that’s only a piece of it, it’s the entire Pattern that’s important. Separation, initiation, and return.Where we are now is the Penetration to the Source of Power.” Kane sat up, saw that he was on a bare stained mattress in a deserted living module. Empty bottles, hypos, and various plastic wrappers littered the floor.“What is this place?”

“Curtis calls it ‘Little Juarez.’ Charming, isn’t it?”

“We’re looking for a cave.That’s where it is, usually, like where Orpheus goes into hell to rescue Eurydice.”

“Curtis’s kid is in a cave,” Lena said.

“What?”

She looked startled, as if she hadn’t meant to say it out loud.“There’s some kind of a cave out on the slope of the volcano.A bunch of the kids moved out there, including Curtis’s little girl.”

“Why? What are they doing out there?”

“I kind of got the impression there’s something wrong with them. Birth defects, genetic damage, like that.There’s a couple of lifetimes’ worth of work up here, and they won’t even let me see those kids.”

“Then that must be where it is.”

“Where what is?”

“The source of power. Like the Fleece, or the Grail, or Susa-no-wo’s sword.”

“Kane, man, this is not a myth. This is happening. Real Russians, real lasers, real corpses, real soon.”

“But what if the other was real, too? Like some kind of tension in the universe, and it has to keep happening over and over again until somebody gets it right. See, because Jason got the Fleece, but he didn’t do it right and ended up all alone, an outcast. Percival gets to see the grail, but he doesn’t get to keep it.Yamato-Takeru was a great warrior, but his spirit was weak and that was what killed him.”

“And now it’s your turn? Is that it?”

“Maybe.”

“I’ve got a better idea.All this mythology crap, that’s what you did in college, right? So your uncle puts this implant in your skull because there’s something up here he wants you to do for him, and he doesn’t trust you to do what you’re told. Only the biotic circuit isn’t quite hooked up right. Or maybe it is but you’re fighting it too hard, and as a result all his orders are getting filtered through a layer of intellectual bullshit, and it comes out in these crazy fantasies of yours.”

“This isn’t just some intellectual exercise. I’ve been seeing all this, reliving it.”

“Those dreams, you mean.Where you woke up screaming.”

“More than dreams. It was like I was really there.”

“Yeah, okay, that’s fine, but none of that is any reason for us staying here. As soon as I can get Takahashi off the computer in the sick bay, we

should get the hell off this planet.”

“Computer? He said something about that.What’s he doing?”

“It looks innocent enough, but apparently he’s shuttling all the scientific data from their computer into a blind file where it’s being transmitted to the ship.”

“Doesn’t he need some kind of access codes to get into their files?”

“He’s got all the overrides.Who do you think built their computer?”

“Oh,” Kane said.“Yeah. Morgan. Does everybody but me know what’s going on around here?”

“Morgan had this all planned. Haven’t you got that figured out yet? He can trust Takahashi because Takahashi’s loyal to the company.You he doesn’t have to trust. He’s got you wired. He owns you.”

“And you?”

“I’m just desperate,” Lena said.“I don’t know enough to hurt him, and I don’t have anyplace else to go.”

“And Reese? What about him?”

“Reese is out of it.”

Out of it, Kane thought.There had been something in that last dream, something about Reese. He’d called Reese’s name. His stomach squirmed with unease, and the adrenaline amplified it toward panic.“I have to find him,” he said.“Where is he?”

“I haven’t seen him all day. I can’t tell you. But I think you should let him go. He’s off on some private trip of his own. Just let him play it out, and you and me and Takahashi will save ourselves.”

Kane stood up.The adrenaline leveled the room and kept him on his feet.“We need him.Where’s this cave you were talking about? Could you find it?”

“No way.And neither could you.There’s a dust storm blowing up out there. If we launch right now, we should still be okay. If we wait around we’re going to get stuck here.”

Kane pushed past her into the empty living room and started to open the front door.The resistance against his pull reminded him that he needed a mask and he looked around for one.

“Don’t do this, Kane.”

He saw the tank lying in a corner by the door and slung it under his arm.“I’ll be back,” he said.

Night had nearly fallen; a swollen, refracted sun oozed through an orange cloud that covered the horizon. Most of the window boxes along the west wall were occupied, but the colonists showed only a minimal interest in the approaching storm.They’d seen it all before, Kane thought.To them it would be as dull as rain in the tropics of Earth.At least half of them looked drunk or sedated, their faces slack and accepting.The adrenaline made Kane feel like a blur of light in a slow motion film.

He followed his voices to the south airlock, moved in a near frenzy through the neatly stacked helmets and life-support packs.That afternoon he thought he’d seen an infrared helmet, the only sure way he had of tracking Reese through the dust and darkness.

Assuming he was right, assuming Reese was with the kids in the cave. But he had to be.That was the Pattern.

Some of the rx suits still lay sprawled on the floor like blast victims; under one of them, Kane found the helmet. He slipped it over his head and powered up.The room shifted into cool yellows and greens, Kane’s handprints showing like orange bruises on the suit he’d just turned over.

He took off the helmet and suited up; the dexterity of his fingers unable to keep up with the urgency screaming in his brain. Finally, almost as an afterthought, he opened the locker where he’d left his hipari and took out the Colt .38.

A gift from Morgan, he now realized, with a hypnotic or implanted instruction to forget it until the subliminals had turned on his software in Deimos space. He still wasn’t quite sure what he was to do with it, but that too, he felt confident, would come to him.

This time he thought to check the cylinder of the gun; dull brass showed in five of the chambers, with the last, under the hammer, empty. Kane threw out a can of emergency rations and fitted the pistol into his chest pack, barely getting the velcro fasteners closed over it.

He was raising the helmet into place when he saw the blood.

Three coin-sized splatters lay on the floor under the airlock controls; a long smear, carrying a single thumbprint, stretched across the edge of the airlock door. Kane did not doubt for an instant that it was Reese’s.

He sealed the O-rings on his helmet and crossed through the airlock, into the desert. Heat puffed out in yellow clouds around him as he stepped out onto the dark green regolith.Arsia Mons was preternaturally clear in the infrared screen of the helmet, sharply profiled in shades of yellow-green.As he moved toward the mountain, he began to see Reese’s footprints as faintly lighter splotches on the cold green ground. Then, behind a tall vertical outcrop, he saw the edges of a metal airlock, glowing an inviting red.

The wind around him was strong enough to lift particles of sand, meaning a wind velocity of close to a hundred miles an hour, but the air itself was so thin that he could barely feel its resistance.The electronics of his helmet divided the last blue-white light of the sunset into quantified brightness bands, the pattern distorted by the turbulence of the upper atmosphere.

The eerie, digitally-processed beauty of the night had only a peripheral effect on Kane; it was a stage set, a cyclorama, for a play in which he had been completely consumed by his role.

His voices sang to him as he climbed the shining mountain.

His last throw of the I Ching had given Reese hexagram 56, La, the Wanderer.“Strange lands and separation are the wanderer’s lot.”“Fire on the mountain” was the image, and Reese pictured Arsia Mons blazing in volcanic splendor, the way it must have looked hundreds of thousands of years ago.

He put the coins in the pocket of his pants, a final, sentimental gesture, and put the book into the duffel under his bed. He could not seem to get warm. He knew it was the hypothermia of dread, his central nervous system desensitizing him for imminent disaster.

Takahashi sat in the next room, programming some complex swindle into the main computer. Reese didn’t want to interrupt, but time was running out.

He stood behind Takahashi’s chair and watched the cursor shooting across lines of programming.“Listen, man,” he said.“There’s trouble.”

“What kind?” Takahashi’s concentration did not waver; his fingers rattled the keyboard like a maraca.

“Russians.”

“Have they landed yet?”

I shouldn’t be surprised, Reese thought. He’s known everything else. “Half of them here, half still in orbit, with a laser.”

Takahashi nodded and fed his program to the compiler.“Are they going to use it, you think?”

“Yeah,” Reese said.“I think they are.They gave Curtis until midnight, but I don’t think Curtis is going to play.”

“Curtis is an asshole.What does this do to your plans?”

“My plans?” Reese said.

“I’m not stupid, Reese. I know what those kids have. I heard the same tape you did, and others besides. I know what was in that base camp on Deimos—an astrometry unit. I could see the diskette under your shirt yesterday and today it’s gone.”

“Don’t try to stop me,Takahashi.”

“I wouldn’t dream of it,” he said, turning back to scan for errors.

“I don’t get you. If Morgan knew—”

“Morgan doesn’t know. I didn’t send him any message last night. The last he heard we were heading down toward the surface yesterday morning.”Takahashi almost smiled.“I expect he’s half out of his mind.”

“What kind of game are you playing? I thought you were Morgan’s man, all the way.”

“I’m a company man,”Takahashi said.“There’s a difference. But none of that is important now.You get on out of here, and I’ll do what I can about the Russians.”

“Takahashi, I—”

Takahashi shook his head.“Good luck,” he said.

Reese took his hand.“Thanks,” he said, and left him there.

In the long afternoon under the dome the Martians were carrying on with their fishbowl lives. By now Molly would be huddled with Curtis, no doubt trying to talk him out of some desperate cowboy-and-Indian shootout with the Russians. He’d already said goodbye to her anyway, as best he could. He would have liked to have seen Kane one more time, to somehow divest himself of the responsibility he felt for Kane’s being here, to shed the paternal role he’d never wanted.

But maybe it would be easier this way.

He recognized the dark clouds boiling out of the south and thought they could only make it easier for him to get away from the dome. He could feel his emotions pulling back deeper inside him, the way the heat of his body had pulled back toward the core, cutting him off from the rest of the world, severing the connections. Soon, he thought, he would look like one of the zombie farmers, with no recognition left in his eyes.

He fought not to respond to the colors of the evening, so rich that he could almost smell them through his oxygen mask: the damp ground of the fields, the sharp yellows and browns of pineapples, the soft pinks of flowering cacti. All things are full of weariness, he told himself, a man cannot utter it. He thought instead of the narrow, filmy rings of Uranus, of the green, staring eye of the planetary nebula in Lyra.

He went into the south changing room and closed the door.

Something had happened here earlier today; the suits and helmets had been badly knocked around. Reese ignored the damage, took an extra large suit from the far end of the rack, and started to take his shoes off.

“Reese.”

He turned, saw Blok standing in the doorway.

“What are you doing?” Blok said, his nervousness driving his voice even lower than its normal Slavic pitch.

“I’m going up to the cave, Blok.” He wasn’t sure why the words came out. It seemed to him he might just as easily have said nothing at all.

“I can’t let you do that,” Blok said. Reese looked up again, and this time Blok was holding a 7mm Luger.

“So,” Reese said.“It’s Russia again. I thought you were beyond that. I thought you were part of the colony now.”

“Don’t patronize me, Reese.What do you know about loyalties? Who do you have to be loyal to? Your fellow astronauts? Your family?”

Reese flinched, his guilt at abandoning Jenny to her husband fresh in his mind again. He could have tried harder to get through to her, maybe won her away, and saved her life.

Stop it, he told himself.There’s no point in torturing yourself. It’s too late for any of that.

“You can’t even understand how I think,” Blok went on.“You can’t understand what rodina means to a Russian.You don’t even have the word in your language, just ghosts of it.‘Homeland.’What does that mean? You can’t even translate the idea.”

“This isn’t to do with you,”Reese said.“It doesn’t have anything to do with Russia or the US or Frontera or anything else.This is just for me.”

“That’s naive, Reese.You know better.There is no such thing as a non-political act. Everything is political.And I cannot let you leave. Nobody leaves until this whole thing is sorted out.”

Reese stood up.“You can’t use the gun in here,Blok.It’s too dangerous.”

Blok steadied his right hand with his left.“Then don’t force me.”

Reese took a step toward him, but Blok stood his ground.

“Put it away,” Reese said.“Please.This is something I have to do.”

They were less than six feet apart. Reese stared at the distorted proportions of the Luger, the swollen barrel, the arms stretching away forever behind it. It seemed to Reese that Blok would probably use the gun. It was like poker, he thought.There were times you paid to see the hole card, even when you already knew what it was going to be. Because, he thought, there were just certain hands you had to pay for.

He took another step and Blok fired.

For a second, Reese could not connect the loud, sharp snap of the pistol with the shove that rocked him back on his feet, with the point of heat in his left shoulder that was at the same time numbingly cold.Then his forebrain put it into one-syllable words for him: I’ve been shot.

Before Blok could fire again, Reese stepped in and put his own, larger hands around the gun. His left arm was nearly useless, but with the strength of his right he began to crush Blok’s fingers, pushing the barrel of the gun up and back, until Blok whimpered and tried to let go, and Reese pushed the gun back hard, catching Blok across the bridge of his nose and down one cheek with the barrel.

Blok slipped to his knees and Reese pulled the gun away with his left hand, the fingers stiff and desensitized, swinging his right fist around, trying for the jaw but bouncing painfully off the cheekbone instead. He stood back, breathing hard, and watched Blok sway for a second, then topple slowly forward onto his face.

The bullet had torn through the trapezius muscle of Reese’s shoulder and dimpled the durofoam behind him, lodging in the structural plastic of the wall without cracking it.A good thing, he thought, I was there to slow it down.

There was a good deal of blood. He touched the hole in his shoulder and had to steady himself against the doorframe, leaving a trail on the enameled metal. He found a first aid kit and sprayed both sides of the wound with K platelets, feeling the skin prickle and tighten as the tangle of fibrin formed quickly into a scab.

He had to put the Luger down to get into the gloves of the suit; when he was finished, he fitted the gun back into the limp fingers, not knowing what else to do with it.A sizzling ache spread through the muscles of his back, making his throat tighten and his eyes water.The

first aid kit contained a vial of Butorphanol, but Reese closed the cover before the temptation got the better of him. He was not going to stagger through this in an analgesic haze.

He had to start moving. He cycled through the lock and walked toward the setting sun, watching the south wind pump billows of dust into the twilight.The kids’ cave had been the first permanent outpost on Mars; his feet knew the way, even if shock had left him a little faint and clumsy. He crawled into the airlock and lay still as the atmosphere blew in around him, reality flickering on and off as he fought to get his breath.

“He’s hurt,” somebody said, and the helmet came off his head. Somebody else handed him a dish of beet sugar and a glass of water, and he lapped up the sugar with his tongue, the taste of it alternating between nauseating sweetness and the bitterness of sand.

“How bad is it?”Verb asked, squatting in front of him.

He blinked. He sat propped against one wall, looking out on a room of endless darkness, punctuated by cones of intense white light. Under two of the cones he could see children typing rapidly into crts; under a third, a Rhesus monkey ate popcorn out of a wastebasket.Verb’s slightly pop-eyed stare was centered on the blood at the edge of his neck.

“Not...serious,” he said.“Just let me get my wind back, I’ll be okay.” He saw the gun still clinging to his useless left hand and shook it loose, pushing it away from him across the floor.

“You’re bleeding,”Verb said.“You don’t look good.”

“It’s superficial,” Reese said.“I sprayed it, it’s okay. Really.”

“Don’t fool around with me,”Verb said.“Okay? Because this is important to me, too. I can’t have you dying on me.”

“I wouldn’t dream of it.”

“Okay, then. Because it looks good. It looks really good.” Her face shone with a thin film of sweat, and her body gave off a sharp odor of excitement.“Crunch, do the lights, okay?” One by one the spots blinked off, and Reese felt his pulse skittering away from the totality of the darkness, the darkness like a sensory dep tank, like blindness, like death.

“Crunch has got a program,”Verb said.“You run that map you gave us through a hologram projector, and set it for a very small scale...”

Pinpoints of light appeared in the darkness, not giving off enough illumination to locate the walls or floor, instead creating the illusion of stars in infinite space.And then, gradually, they began to move.A trinary system spun past his face, and below his legs he could see the dense exploding gas at the heart of the galaxy. In the distance floated the purple smears of the great nebulas, and beyond them tiny quasars spat high-intensity radiation out through the tornadoes at their poles.All of them visible at once, crammed together, blazing with life.

Reese felt the hard, hot kernel of despair that had brought him this far begin to melt, to transform itself back into its original components of wonder, awe, and burning ambition.

“You’ll go through in your suit,”Verb said.“We’ve got a parachute and some survival gear just in case, including some food and water and extra air.There’s a transmitter that will let us know if you made it. Eventually, that is.About twelve years from now, for the round trip.”

“Okay,” Reese said.

“We’re shooting for a kilometer above what we think is the surface of an Earth-size planet.We could screw up and put you underground, in which case you explode, or we may put you so far out you’ll burn up on the way down.There may not be any air for the chute to grab. It could be a gas planet, in which case none of this matters anyway. Okay?”

“Okay,” Reese said.

“It may not work at all.”

“Do it,” Reese said.“Let’s go.” He didn’t know if it was the sugar, the aftereffects of circulatory shock, or Verb’s dazzling light show, but he was euphoric, nearly manic. He got to his feet, felt like he was flying through the universe without a ship.

“Crunch!”

In the darkness between two arms of the galaxy, a cold, cloudy rectangle began to glow, then shimmered and fluoresced into an oily rainbow of colors. Reese took a halting step toward it, disoriented by the invisibility of the physical room. Large, soft hands moved over his injured arm, attaching the parachute and some kind of knapsack. He shrugged into the harness, wincing at the pressure over the wound, and tightened all the straps. He pushed his helmet back into place and switched the radio to ext.

“What do I do?” he asked, his mouth dry again.

“You just walk through.The next thing you know you’ll be there. Even if you were conscious, which you won’t be, there’s no such thing as time when you’re moving that fast.”

Reese felt himself nodding. He slid one foot forward, and his ankle brushed the edge of a desk; he felt his way around it with his good hand, never taking his eyes from the glistening doorway. He could see the hard metal edges now, could almost reach it if he stretched out his hand.

The room flooded with light.

He turned, saw a suited figure crawling out of the lock.

“Reese,” said a droning, mechanical voice from the suit.“Reese, stop.”

“Kane?”

Kane pulled the helmet off.“Reese! For God’s sake, man, get away from there!” In the harsh light of the airlock Kane’s face was lunar white, his eyes luminous craters. Reese could read comprehension in his expression, but no understanding.Their eyes locked, and Reese felt the anguish of Kane’s rootlessness, the depth of his betrayal.

Explain it to him, Reese thought.Tell him that you’re not some Greek hero, noble, selfless, dealing justice with swift, righteous arrows. Tell him he’s on his own.Tell him.

The biggest of the children, a giant with the distorted jaw and fingers of acromegaly, put a hand against Kane’s chest, and Reese saw him flinch from the pain in his ribs.

“I’m sorry,” Reese whispered, his suit radio turning the words flat and metallic.“I’m sorry, Kane. But you don’t need me anymore.”As he heard his own words, Reese realized they were true.“You never did,” he said.

He raised one hand, the cold in his chest and testicles consuming him, robbing him of his voice. He turned away from Kane and walked slowly through the shimmering doorway.

Three hours,” Curtis said,“seven minutes, and about fifteen

seconds left.”

“Maybe they’re bluffing,” Molly said.

She’d been through too much, too quickly, she thought: Dian’s murder, Kane’s arrest, the Russian threat, and now this, her first sight of Curtis’s inner sanctum. She’d seen the bank of monitors at his secretary’s desk, but nothing had prepared her for this, another entire room that opened out of the back of his office, lined on both sides with monitor screens.

At the far end of the room sat one of Curtis’s lieutenants, a bearded, good-looking Brazilian named Alonzo who’d once made a rather blatant and unsuccessful pass at her. He’d been carrying on an obvious attempt to ignore her bickering with Curtis for over fifteen minutes now.

“Russian technology, you know,” Molly went on.“It’s not exactly dependable.”

Unlike this stuff, she thought.The cameras could be operated by remote control, and each held up to three hours of continuous updated information that could be replayed in programmable sequences. It shocked and frightened Molly that so many of the colony’s resources could have been diverted into such a comprehensive and insidious program of surveillance.They had let it happen, all of them had, and she was just as guilty as anyone else.

“They offered us a demonstration,” Curtis said nastily.“You want to take them up on it? What would you like to lose? The ice reservoirs, maybe? How about the cave, and all the kids up there, and that god-damned secret project of yours? All we have to do is ask.”

It seemed to Molly that he had been walking for some time now along the cliff-edge of some kind of epiphany, a revelation that would fuse the disparate aspects of his personality into a single, unified whole. Maybe, she thought, it would turn out to be a true apotheosis, that he would somehow save Frontera in a bare-chested act of heroism. More likely it would be a spectacular, shattering collapse. He was coming unraveled at an ever-increasing rate, caught in some kind of runaway neurogenic disaster.

“Okay,” she said.“Okay.They’re not bluffing. So how much longer are you going to just sit here?” His cameras had followed Mayakenska as she’d taken her walk, then followed her back to her room.The house was dark now,Valentin sitting on a spotlit stool in the kitchen to phone in the hourly codes.They now had three of those calls on tape.

“Until I think of something,” Curtis said,“Like figure out the codes, or something.”

“They’re using mission designations from the Salyut program,” Molly said.“I saw them in a book once.They probably have to be in chronological order or something. But I don’t see what that gives us.”

Curtis looked startled, then embarrassed.“You’re probably right. It’s not much, but it’s a start. If we have to, now we can—”

“Curtis,”Alonzo said.“You’d better look at this.”

Molly spun around in her chair and followed his pointing finger.All she could see was an ordinary star field.

“Christ!” Curtis shouted.“That’s the camera in the cave! Are they jamming us?”

“I don’t think so,”Alonzo said. His nerves, Molly thought, were suffering too; she could see nasty red discolorations through the beard on the underside of his chin.‘‘I think it’s some kind of holo projection in the cave itself.”

“Back up the memory,” Curtis ordered,“and put it on another unit.” Molly watched as a second screen filled with the star field.Then the stars winked out, and she could see Verb bent over a suited figure.

“Reese!” she said. Her chair shot away as she came to her feet. “He’s hurt. Back up the camera at the south lock, catch him on the way out.”

Alonzo glanced at Curtis, who nodded.“Do it.”

On a third screen Molly watched Reese move backward in time, backing out of the airlock, turning, lurching into Blok’s unconscious body as it rose from the floor. She watched a bullet dig itself out of the wall and suck a thin line of smoke into the barrel of Blok’s gun.

“Oh my Christ,” Molly said.

On the real-time screen an oily pool of light had formed in the center of the cave.A shadow moved across it: Reese, in his suit, silhouetted against the opalescent field of energy.

“Stop him!” Molly shouted.“For God’s sake, somebody stop him!” She lunged for the microphone to radio the cave, but Curtis wrenched her away by one arm.

“No,” he said. His head shone in the dim flickering light of the screens, reflected images distorting his features.“I want to see this.”

“He can’t...they can’t let him go through there! It isn’t tested! He—”

The milky glow touched the edges of Reese’s suit, flared, and consumed him.

Curtis let go of her arm, and Molly sank into one of the chairs, feeling betrayed, frightened, on the verge of hysteria.

“Well,” Curtis said.“This is getting really interesting. Do you want to tell me some more about how those kids are just playing around with theoretical physics? About how we should just let the Russians have anything they want? Jesus, Molly, I can’t believe you let things get this far without telling me.”

My father, she thought.The words carried an eerie emotional weight. She’d always called him Reese, never Father, never Daddy. Daddy was the stranger who had lived with her mother and died with her on the Gerard K. O’Neill. There were no precut words that fit Reese and what he meant to her.

What could have been so important to him that he thought he had to risk that weird machine? Where had Verb sent him? Not back to Earth, that made no sense at all.

Outward, then. Like father, like daughter, both obsessed with the outward urge.

Not that it mattered, because now he was dead. Probably dead the instant he stepped into the energy field, but if not, then he’d be dead at the other end, was now only a probability wave whose value was death, death by explosion, by fire, cold, or vacuum.

She tried to picture it, to use the pain to cauterize the wound.

“Alonzo,” Curtis said.“Get three or four of your people, whoever you can find, and get them to the south airlock.We’ll meet you there.”

Alonzo squeezed between Molly’s chair and the console, his eyes moving expressionlessly past her face.

“Come on,” Curtis said. He pulled at her arm, trying to make her stand up. She stared at him blankly.“Come on!” he repeated.

She got to her feet.“Where...?”

“I’ve had it. Okay? I’ve had it. I’m through fucking around. It’s answer time.”

“What do you mean? What are you doing?”

She followed him down the stairs, stumbling a little in trying to match his pace. It wasn’t until they passed the last row of living modules that she realized where he was taking her.

“We can’t go out there,” she said.“The storm—”

“Fuck the storm,” Curtis said.“We know the way.”

Molly didn’t answer.The danger was not in getting lost, and certainly not in being blown around by the wind, which didn’t have the friction velocity to lift anything larger than a pebble.The danger came from the sheer quantity of fine particles in the air, particles that could clog or abrade the worn, delicate mechanisms of their suits.

Molly stripped off her foolish orange suit and put on a pair of recycled cotton pants and a T-shirt from her locker.As she was getting into the bottom half of the suit,Alonzo came in with three reinforcements: a young woman named Hanai, one of Curtis’s sapping partners named Iain, and Lena.

“She was wandering around downstairs,”Alonzo said.“She wanted to come.”

“Fine,” Curtis said.

Molly watched the thin black woman get into a suit. Kane had slept with her, she decided, feeling a morbid sort of curiosity about it, a slight, illogical pang of jealousy.

They dressed in silence, Curtis ready before any of the others and pacing out his anger in front of the lockers.Then they crowded into the airlock and passed through into the night. Molly kept her head down as they crossed the plains to the cave, seeing only the swirling dust and the rise and fall of Curtis’s boots in the circle of light in front of her.

The cave was spotlit again as they slithered in, two at a time.The vivid, dizzying hologram starfields had disappeared.At the dim edge of one cone of brightness she could see Verb’s transporter gate, a steel door frame connected to kilometers of fiber optic cables. Depression spread through her like a cloud of ink, and only then did she realize that she’d still been hoping to find Reese alive, saved by a blown fuse or a last-second failure of nerve.

No, she thought, not a failure of nerve. Not Reese.

Curtis stripped off his suit as he waited for the others, but Molly left hers on. Insulation, she thought, against the unpleasantness to come. When the last of his people came through, Curtis locked the inner hatch open to keep anyone else from using it.

“Spread out,” he told them.“Just stay out of the way for right now.” Molly noticed a look passing between Curtis and Lena, Lena questioning, Curtis distracted and vaguely irritated. Lena moved off with the others.

“Verb?” Molly said.“Verb, where are you?”

Finally she saw the girl coming toward her out of the shadows, her eyes shining with a joy that was still not enough to transform her face. “I did it, mother, I sent him. He already knew about the machine, I wasn’t the one who told him about it. I didn’t break my promise.”

“I know you didn’t,” Molly said.

“He wanted it, he wanted it so much, and so I sent him.”

“I know,” Molly said. She reached out a hand and Verb took it, carefully, and held on.

Then Curtis moved into the light and Verb pulled away.“So he is here,” she said, as if some dire prediction had just come true.“What

does he want?”

“I want to talk to you,” Curtis said.

“No,”Verb said. Her massive head, on its trunk-like neck, rolled back and forth.“No.”

“You’ve really got yourselves quite a setup,” Curtis said, ignoring her. “It’s been a long time since I’ve been up here.Too long. How about a little light, and then you can show me around.”

Verb stared at him in rigid defiance.

“I know where the controls are,” Curtis said.“Either you can do it yourself, or I’ll go over there and do it for you.”

“Crunch, turn on the lights,” she said, and Molly saw that the girl had taken her first step backward, that ultimately she would not be able to resist him.

The lights faded up to the level of a cloudy morning.

“Good. Now let’s have a look at your machine, okay?”

“No,”Verb said.“It’s my machine. I don’t have to show it to you.”

“You’re not a baby anymore,” Curtis said.“Don’t overplay the role, okay? You’re a part of this society as long as you use up our resources, and you’ve used up a hell of a lot of them here. I represent that society and I have the right to know what you’re doing.”

Verb’s head swiveled to face Molly.

Oh God,she thought,this is it.What in Christ’s name am I going to say to her?“He’s right,”she said hesitantly.“I mean,he’s right that he represents the society, and you have to account to him for what you’re doing.” She took a breath and looked over at Curtis, who nodded with a smug self-assurance that infuriated her. She could see a thin, dark line where he’d cut himself shaving his head; he could have used a depilatory cream, she thought, it was crazy to shave your head with a blade...

She turned back to Verb.“But you also have to account to yourself. You’re responsible for what you create, do you understand? If somebody is going to use what you’ve made for something bad—”

“That’s enough, Molly,” Curtis said.

“—that makes you responsible for what they do, too.You can’t let your work be perverted—”

“Shut up!” He didn’t need to raise his voice; the violence screamed from the angles of his wrists and legs. She let herself trail off.

Verb seemed to be physically shrinking, as if the psychological pressure were crushing her body as well. Dear God, Molly thought, the future of the human race may be riding on this little girl.And I think she knows it.

“Listen to me,” Curtis said to the girl.“You care for your mother, don’t you? When she talks about loyalty and betrayal and taking responsibility and that kind of thing, you believe her, don’t you?”

Molly saw it coming and could not get out of the way, like an animal trapped in the lights of a car.

“You trust her, don’t you? You want to believe she’s noble and brave and loving, but suppose she knew something important and didn’t tell you about it because she was afraid it might hurt this project?”

“She wouldn’t do that,”Verb said.

“I think she would. Suppose it was something about you that might upset you so much that you couldn’t work anymore?”

“What?”Verb whispered.“Go on, say it.”

“Ask your mother,” Curtis said, and folded his arms in front of him.

“Well?”Verb said.“Is there something?”

“Yes,” Molly said. Her throat was blocked and it came out as a glottal hiss.

“Then tell me now.”

“We thought...oh God, we thought we could find something.We didn’t want to frighten you...”

“You think this isn’t frightening?”

“There’s something called Turner’s syndrome. It’s not what you have, but it’s similar. In Turner’s, you only have one X chromosome instead of two, and the ovaries never form.”

“Are you saying I can’t have any kids? Because I don’t care about that. Why should I want to have kids?”

Molly shook her head.“No.You’ve got both X chromosomes, but they’re full of what they call nonautonomous elements that inactivate the genes.When you get to puberty—” Molly started to cry. She tried to make the words come out, but they couldn’t get past the blockage in her throat. I’ve been holding them back so long, she thought, and now they just won’t come.

“Tell me,” she said to Curtis.

“It’s going to kill you,” Curtis said.“High blood pressure, edema, protein in the urine. Convulsions. Coma. Death.”

Verb nodded. She was still staring at Molly and Molly couldn’t look away from her. React, she ordered her silently. Cry, hit me, for God’s sake do something.

“We’ve known since you were three or four,” Molly said.The tears ran down her face and neck past the collar of her suit and down the channel between her breasts.“It’s...it’s like a part of whatever it was that gave you your intellect. It’s like prodigy burnout or one of those things where...you just burn all of yourself up at once.”

“You could have told me.”

“I know,” Molly said.“But there was nothing you could do.”

“What the hell,”Verb said, her face suddenly red, her fists clenched, “does that have to do with it? I know it’s hopeless, I’ve known for three years.”

Molly looked at Curtis, whose expression seemed frozen in place. “You...knew?” she said.

“Of course I knew. I’ve been into all the medical records, even the ones you tried to hide. How do you think it felt to learn it that way, sitting alone up here, watching it come up in little green letters on a black screen? And then after I tried to give you chances to tell me, I did everything but bring it up myself, because I wanted to hear it from you.

“But you never told me, and you know why? Because you don’t care about me. I’m not really human to you, I never have been. If your dog has a terminal disease, well, you just give her a warm place to sleep and all the food she wants and then you cry when she goes.”

“Sarah...” Molly held out her hand but the girl looked at it with contempt.Was it true? Molly wondered. If Sarah had been more loving, more...normal looking, would it have made a difference? Would she have fought harder when Curtis said not to tell her?

Verb turned her back on both of them, silent sobs moving through her curved back and wattled neck. Molly felt herself slipping into the mindset of despair: if I ever get out of this...She and Curtis were finished; the truce that had been in effect since that afternoon was over. She thought she could kill him now, if she had to.

At that moment Curtis stooped and picked something off the floor. It was the gun that Reese had been shot with, the one he’d brought with him from the dome. She saw how seductively the weapon fit into Curtis’s hand.

Verb faced them again, her tears gone, her emotions back in harness. Her eyes registered the gun in Curtis’s hand, then moved slowly back to his face.

“You won’t need that,”she said.“I’ll tell you what you want to know.”

He says it’s important,”Valentin told her. Mayakenska shook her head, trying to come completely awake. So, she thought, I could sleep after all.“All right,” she said.“I’m coming.”

She pulled on a pair of coveralls, wincing at their stale smell, and walked carefully into the living room. Her visitor was short, Japanese, wearing a sleeveless shirt that showed off his physique.

“Do I know you?” she asked.

“No,” he said.“My name is Takahashi and I work for Chairman Morgan.”He frowned and corrected himself.“For Pulsystems,I should say.”

“And what do you want with me?”

“Curtis is not going to deal with you,”Takahashi said.“If your threats are genuine, that means I am scheduled to die with the rest of this settlement at midnight tonight.”

“I see news travels quickly here.”

Takahashi shrugged.“We both want the same thing. I’ve spent most of the day inside the main computer, and I’ve located the main source of computer time usage.That means I know what the project is and where it is. On the other hand, you can call off that laser.What say we make our own deal and cut Curtis out entirely?”

She remembered who this Takahashi was, now. He didn’t just work for Pulsystems, he was a junior vice president and sat on the Board, representing the interests of the zaibatsu that controlled Pulsystems Tokyo.

She distrusted him, in particular, and the Japanese in general. Ever since the Japanese sneak attack on Port Arthur in 1904, Russia and Japan had been enemies, Japan even choosing to side with America after World War II, despite the fact that American bombs had obliterated Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

“And your part in this would entitle you to a share in the knowledge, is that right?”

“Of course.”

“I fail to see why we need you.”

“If you could locate the equipment—and even that is not going to be as easy as you might think—you don’t even know how to run it or what to do with it.”

“And you do?”

“The answers I don’t have, I can get.”

The phone rang.

“It seems to me you are trying to sell me your self-confidence and little else.” She held up her hand before Takahashi could answer her. “Excuse me.”

She crossed the room and picked up the kitchen extension. “Mayakenska.”

“This is Curtis. Can we talk?”

“Of course.”

“Good. Let’s get some basic terms squared away, then, okay? Because a lot of this is new to me, too.The machine you’re interested in is a transporter, am I correct? Straight-line transmission and recovery of material at or near the speed of light?”

She felt the first tinglings of a flood of relief and excitement.“Ah, yes, correct, that sounds like the equipment.”

“Good.You should probably know that we also have the ability to produce rather large quantities of antimatter—in fact the power for the machine in question comes from antimatter.”

Mayakenska glanced over at Takahashi and repressed a smile.“Curtis, if you want, we can wait and go over this with my people...”

“I think you should hear me out.The antimatter is stored in Liedenfrost jars that use the energy of the antimatter decay to contain the antimatter itself.Are you with me so far?”

“Yes.” She had to pull her right hand away from her mouth to answer him; she had found herself gnawing on the thumbnail without realizing it.

“This decay is mediated by an electromagnetic field.That field may be turned off as the container is sent through that matter transmitter that we were just talking about. In that case the material of the container will be quickly eaten away.An explosion is the result.The explosion can be quite large, as I’m sure you can imagine.Are you still with me?”

“Yes,” she said.

“My first thought was that we would drop a canister of this stuff into your Salyut and blow them out of the sky. But it occurred to me that the message might not be clear enough if I did that. So what I’m going to do is send a rather larger canister through the machine and deposit it in Red Square, just outside the walls of the Kremlin.”

“No,” Mayakenska whispered.

“I make it to be about ten minutes before ten, let’s see, that’s 21 hours 50 minutes.Your deadline was midnight, so I’m going to make mine a half hour earlier. I want to see your Salyut performing a Transearth Injection burn by 23:30 hours or you lose Moscow.”

“You’re bluffing,” Mayakenska said, though she didn’t believe he was.

“Put on your mask,” Curtis said.“Turn right as you walk out your front door, and walk clear out to the edge of the dome.There’s a phone mounted on the wall there. I’ll ring it in three minutes.” The receiver went dead in her hand.

“Curtis?” Takahashi said politely. Of course he had heard.

She nodded. Her legs felt weak, and she had to perch on the edge of a kitchen stool for a moment before she could walk.“You might as well come along,” she said.

His eyebrows came together and he shook his head slightly, not understanding her.

“You’ll want to see this,” she said.“It’s the beginning of the end.”

It took a little over a minute to find the wall-mounted phone in one of the observation alcoves. It occupied one edge of a panel that included three shielded buttons labeled emergency, abandon, and shutdown.The sight filled her with anger and sadness.That’s the enemy, she thought, looking out at the dimly floodlit Martian night, at the ocean of blowing sand.And yet we persist in doing the enemy’s work.

The directors should have known this would happen, should have foreseen this contingency. It was too much like the way Kennedy had humiliated that peasant Krushchev. Brinksmanship and blackmail, weapons too powerful to be used, vicious circles of terror.Was there no way to break the pattern?

The phone rang and she snatched it up.“Go ahead.”

“Tell me what you see outside the dome,” Curtis said.

“Not much.There’s a lot of dust.There are some good-sized rocks.”

“Okay. Can you see four of them sort of together there?”

“Yes, okay.”

“Pick one.”

I hate this, Mayakenska thought. But what else am I supposed to do? “There’s a low rock shelf about a hundred meters past those four—”

“Fine,” Curtis said, and hung up on her again.

Maybe, she thought, it won’t work. Maybe it will blow up in his face. And maybe Uncle Lenin will come rescue us all.

“We’re going to get a demonstration, then,” Takahashi said.

She turned, startled. He’d been so quiet she’d forgotten he was there. “Yes, I think so.”

“Beating the proverbial plowshare into a sword?”

“Sorry?”

“It’s not important,”Takahashi said.“Will there be a flash? Should I be looking the other way?”

“Gamma rays, I think.This is outside my experience.” She sat down on one of the cast concrete benches, then stood up again.“Maybe it’s not—”

The flash was bright enough that she turned instinctively away, covering her eyes with her hands.The sound followed instantaneously, rising with the shockwave through her feet, pitching her to her knees, a booming peal of thunder so loud she felt something tearing in her ears. She reached out for the bench and felt it shaking too, closed her eyes and bent her head to her knees, still hearing a ghostly feedback whine behind the thudding of rocks and dirt against the dome.

The phone began to ring.

“All right, I hear you,” she said, crawling onto the bench. “Yob tvayu mat, I hear you.” The explosion had torn dirty white chunks out of the dome’s plastic, but had somehow not cracked it. Nothing remained of the shelf of land but a thickening in the cloud of red-brown dust.

She thought of the importniye leather coats in the window of gum; the somber red granite of Lenin’s mausoleum, just across the cobblestone street; the riotous colors of the domes of St. Basil’s at the south end of the square; the contrived Byzantine opulence of the Historical Museum at the north end. In an hour and a half they too would be dust.

The phone kept ringing.

“Are you all right?”Takahashi asked her.A thin line of blood ran from one of his nostrils. She nodded at him, looked past him to the crowd that had come to stare at the dome.

“You,” someone shouted, a woman’s voice, the owner anonymous.“Is that your work?”

Mayakenska could only stare.Takahashi moved in front of her.“No,” he said.“Curtis did that.Your own boy did it. But it’s over now. Everything’s okay.”

“It’s not over,” Mayakensaka said, but no one heard her.When she looked up again the crowd had dissolved into confused, frightened individuals, moving randomly under the artificial twilight.

She stood up.“I’ve got to stop this. I’ll call the ship.”

“I’m going to the cave,” Takahashi said.

“Cave?”

“Where Curtis is.The first settlement.The computer shows a phenomenal amount of usage up there.That’s where they have to be.”

Mayakenska looked at the phone, which had finally stopped ringing. “All right,” she said. She stood up. Her legs were shaky, but she could walk.“I’m going to stop this,” she said.“I promise.”

The house—living module, the Americans called it—at S-23 looked like something out of one of their tv comedies from half a century ago, a “cottage in the suburbs,” if she remembered the vocabulary.The front of the house was weakened by large panes of clear plastic, and the surrounding land was planted with useless, ornamental shrubs.

Lying next to one of the shrubs was a body.

“Blok?” she asked, approaching him cautiously.

“Yes,” he said.“It’s me.” His mask was crooked, and his eyes seemed swollen.“Reese is gone. He’s gone up to the cave.”

“The cave where the transporter is.You didn’t tell me about that, Blok.”

“Just...kids up there. Didn’t want them hurt.”

“Come on inside,” she said.“There’s not much time.”

She helped him into the house and put him in one of the bedrooms. He was bruised and embarrassed, but not critically hurt.

“Valentin?” He had been sitting in the living room watching her, wide-eyed, his right leg jiggling nervously.Amphetamines, Mayakenska thought.“Come with me.You need to hear this.”

She called the orbiter from her bedroom.“Twenty-two hundred hours, code Pamir, repeat Pamir. Give me a relay to Dawn.” Dawn was Mission Control at Kaliningrad, and now that Frontera Base had turned away from the sun she would have to bounce her signal off a worn American comsat orbiting the far side of Mars.

“Okay,” Chaadayev said.“What’s going on down there? We saw some kind of explosion a few minutes ago. Is everything all right?”

“No,” she said.“Everything is wrong...”

Kane pulled free of the giant just as Reese flickered and vanished. He ran toward the glowing doorway, throwing away the infrared helmet as he ran.“No!” he screamed. He tripped over something in the darkness and lunged headlong toward the wall of incandescent particles.

His right hand stretched toward the fiery wall, came close enough for Kane to feel the hairs on the back of it tingle and flutter.Then he found himself sprawled across the spongy durofoam floor of the cave, the metal frame of the doorway arching over him, the power shut down.

Reese was gone.

Kane got onto all fours and looked around. Pockets of light held various crts and scientific instruments; green digital readouts blinked at him from every corner of the room.The illusion of stars and infinite space that he’d seen from the airlock had disappeared, leaving no clue as to whether it had been a hologram or just another product of his implant.

Like the voices, whose high, pure harmony still rang in his skull.

Slowly the children moved out of the darkness, some in rags, some wearing braces on their limbs, some with the glittering eyes of fierce curiosity, some with the slack, moist lips of brain damage. One of them came to within a few feet of him and stopped, her heavy, malformed head turned on its side.

“Welcome to Synchron City,” she said. Kane thought perhaps she was smiling.“Are you Kane?”

“Where’s Reese?” Kane said.“What did you do to him?”

The hideous little girl leaned from side to side, almost dancing with pleasure and excitement.“We transcribed him,” she said.“We transcribed him and then we broadcast him.”

“Broadcast him?” Kane sat back on his heels, bringing himself further away from the girl.“You’re crazy.”

“Do you think so?” she said, and Kane saw that he had carelessly opened an old wound.“Well, I did broadcast him. I gave him the one thing he wanted in the entire universe.”

“Where?” Kane said.“Where did you send him?”

“He brought me a data base that showed maybe a habitable planet around Barnard’s Star. He should reassemble there, if everything works.”

The diskette, Kane thought. So that’s what it was for.That meant that Reese had known about all of this before they’d landed, probably known before they left Earth. One more betrayal.“Barnard’s Star?”

“He’ll know in about 5.868 years. Of course, it won’t be that long for him.”

“Jesus,” Kane said.This was it, then, the source of power, of more power than he had imagined.The electricity that had charged his hand at Reese’s gateway was all around him; he stood in the Omphalos, the navel of this world.The roots of the tree of life grew under his feet, and from here the waters could be freed, releasing grace, nourishment, and light to transform the universe.

He stood and let the awareness electrify him like current charging a capacitor.

Suddenly the girl jerked her head around, and Kane followed her gaze to the lights over the airlock, which had just shifted from green to red.

“Somebody’s coming,” Kane said.

“Curtis.”

“How do you know?”

She shook her head and pointed to a ladder along the nearest wall. “There’s a catwalk up there.You can watch without them seeing you.” Kane hesitated and she said,“You’d better go.”

Kane climbed, the strain on his arms sending waves of pain through his pectorals and deep into his chest.At the top he found a perforated aluminum walkway that circled the cave. It was barely a yard wide and less than six feet from the ceiling, forcing Kane to walk with bent legs and cling to the handrail.

He circled toward the front of the cave, then froze as his foot touched yielding flesh.

“Hello,” said a voice.“Are you from Earth?”

Kane squinted.A boy of about eight or nine clung to the railing, staring intently back at him.A clumsily repaired cleft palate had left the boy with a scar that ran through his upper lip and along the entire left side

of his nose.

“That’s right. My name is Kane.”

“Avec plaisir. I am Pen of My Uncle. Do you speak French?”

Fifteen feet below them the airlock door swung open and they began coming in, two at a time: first Curtis and Molly, then Lena and Hanai, then two of Curtis’s shock troops. Seeing Molly gave him a pang of lust and sorrow that quickly gave way to alarm. Something major, something pivotal was happening; Curtis was making his move. Kane could barely concentrate on what the boy was saying to him.“No,” he said. “English, Japanese, a little Russian.”

“Practical,” the boy said.“French is stupid, nearly useless, except for the existentialists. Russians are good, though. Do you read Ouspensky?”

“I don’t read much,” Kane said.The girl with the swollen head was talking to Curtis and Molly now. The low air pressure kept the sound from reaching him and he could only tell that an emotional storm was building; tears ran from Molly’s eyes.

“Ouspensky is Verb’s favorite.That’s where she got the idea for her physics.” Overhead lights came on and Kane moved further into the shadows.

“Who’s Verb?” he asked.

“That’s her down there. Did you know she was Curtis and Molly’s kid?”

Kane shook his head.“That’s weird. It’s like everything is tied to everything else, all these lines of force...”

“Ouspensky says,‘Every separate human life is a moment of the life of some great being, which lives in us.’ ”

The boy’s words staggered Kane, parted for an instant the membrane that separated his dream personalities from his waking existence. He could feel them watching behind his eyes: Percival, maddened by his imperfection and loss of the Grail,Yamato-Takeru of the shattered spirit, Jason, the fanatic sailor who had failed to intuit the Pattern.

“The Pattern,” Kane said.

“Sure, that’s it, a pattern.That’s all we are in space-time, you know. Just a pattern. In seven years you don’t even have any of the same cells you used to have.There’s only the pattern left.The pattern survives.”

“Yeah,” Kane said.The fever swept over his brain like a brushfire. His neurons all seemed to be firing at once; he rode the tide of electric potential to a psychedelic level of consciousness.“The Pattern of the Hero survives.”

“Ouspensky says heroic characters are just ‘reflexed images of human types which had existed ten thousand years before.’ He says they’re reproduced by ‘mysterious powers controlling the destinies of our world. That which has been will return again.’ ”

On the floor below them,Verb had led Curtis and Molly into a sudden cone of light. It revealed a wooden folding screen of Japanese design; the back had been fitted out with aluminum cages to hold circuit cards and ribbons of cable that led to disk drives and bubble storage.

Kane focused on one panel of the screen, on one 18- by 24-inch sheet of plastic, studded with chips and crowned with a dark blue ceramic box the size of his open hand.

He began to hallucinate in earnest.

From somewhere behind his eyes, a ghostly schematic of the circuit card formed and began to spin into his field of vision, slowly turning through all its axes and dropping away from him, toward its physical counterpart below.

He shut his eyes, and the glowing diagram remained, sketched in the visual purple pigment of his retina, still falling, spinning away from him.

He swayed queasily, opened his eyes, and grabbed for the railing.The phantom projection had aligned itself with the genuine board, and as Kane watched, awed and terrified, the image superimposed itself on the original.

For an instant the entire cave was suffused with brilliant, golden light, and a spasm of pure pleasure arced through Kane’s nervous system.

He dropped to his knees, shivering.

He had just seen his grail.

It seemed to molly that she was watching a butterfly metamorphose into a worm.Ten years ago Curtis had seemed full of strength and beauty and grace; in the cocoon of the Center’s isolation tanks he had become another personality: dry and bitter, erratic, amoral.

In the explosion of the rock ledge outside the dome his transformation became complete.

She hadn’t believed it was really going to happen until the mountain trembled under her feet.There had been no single moment when Curtis had hesitated or lost momentum long enough for the weight of her fear to stop him, to push the balance away from the vision of doom that now obsessed him.And if she had seen her moment, she thought, Alonzo and the goon squad would have kept her from seizing it.

Curtis had sat through the preparations with a phone in one hand, giving orders to his henchmen back inside the dome. Molly could see that he missed his cameras; the explosion would not be completely real for him until he could replay it on the video screen.

It had shocked her to learn that Verb already had packets of antimatter whose retaining fields could be switched off. For experiments,Verb said, or for extending the cave. It was just something they’d made up, that they’d thought would be useful.To Molly it seemed hopelessly naive to have built something that could so easily be transformed into a weapon.

And now they were huddled together, father and distorted daughter, Curtis watching her program the coordinates for Moscow into the computer.Think, she told herself.You’re not helpless. She knew the machine, knew its weaknesses well enough to disable it if she had a chance.

The power board, with its blue ceramic antimatter jar, was the most vulnerable point. From where she stood, behind Curtis, it was five or six meters away on the other side of the bank of crts, disk drives, and walls of folded program listings. If she could get at it, she could pull it completely free of the assembly, like pulling a giant plug out of a socket.

The problem was that Curtis still held the gun. She was not afraid to die, if it came to that, but she was afraid to die without stopping him, without even being able to get to the panel.

She pushed herself away from the desk she’d been leaning on and walked toward the front of the cave, keeping her distance from any of the critical parts of the transporter.All told the thing was nearly ten meters long and four or five wide, the oriental folding screen standing in the center like an oversized breadboard in a child’s do-it-yourself electronic kit.The gateway itself was on the far side, out of Molly’s reach, and none of the thick, black power cables led anywhere but to the main power panel.

She kept walking, noticing for the first time in a long while how large the cave actually was. Most of the time it was lighted with pin spots or dim red floods, as if Verb resented the inflexibility of the raw rock walls.The general overhead lights, dim as they were, seemed like a

violation, one more small brutality.

Something flashed at the front of the cave.

The airlock. Somebody wanted in.

Molly glanced back at Curtis; he hadn’t seen.Alonzo was looking over Curtis’s shoulder, and the only one watching the airlock was Hanai. Molly started for the open hatch as quickly as she could without attracting Curtis’s attention, but before she could get within ten meters Hanai blocked her way.

“Don’t do it, Molly,” she said.

“Do you know what’s going on here? Do you know what Curtis is trying to do?”

Hanai shook her head.“That doesn’t matter. Just stay away from that hatch.”

“I’m not trying to get away. I’m just going to close it.”

“I can see the signal as well as you can.You don’t know who’s out there.What if it’s the Russians?”

“What if it is the Russians?” Molly said.“Curtis is crazy. He’s lost it. He’s going to wipe out Moscow. Do you know what that means? Not just that we lose Frontera, which we will, but it means war, nuclear war,bombs dropping on cities,the end of everything.The Russians will have to retaliate, Morgan will get sucked in, and then it’s the end. Everybody dies.”

Before Hanai could answer Molly gently pushed her aside and crossed the open floor in front of the hatch, stepping over Curtis’s empty suit and switching on the intercom mounted on the wall. She tuned it to the standard suit frequency and said,“This is Molly.Who’s out there?”

“Takahashi.The inner door is jammed or something.Can you get it shut?”

Molly looked back at Hanai, who was still wavering.“Yeah, I’ll shut it. But come in fast and get under cover as soon as you’re inside.There’s a world of trouble going down in here.”

“I already know.”

She closed the hatch and stood with her back to it, watching Curtis at the far end of the cave. Keep your head down, she thought. Just don’t look up. She heard the hatch open behind her and twisted her head to see Takahashi move into the shadows of a set of metal shelves.

Hanai moved slowly toward him, as if fighting her instincts.Takahashi

pulled off his helmet and his eyes connected with Hanai’s. She looked

away quickly.

“Is she still with Curtis?” Takahashi asked Molly.

“I don’t know. I think she’s making up her mind. I take it you two know each other.”

“This morning,” Hanai said.“I found Dian—her body, I mean. I think Curtis killed her.”

“Yeah,” Molly said.“I think he did, too.”

“Can we stop him?” Takahashi asked,

“I don’t know,” Molly said.“He’s got a gun. He could kill us both. I think he’d kill any of us if we pushed him.”

“What about Kane?” Takahashi asked.

“Kane?” Molly risked another look at Curtis; he still had his head down, but he could look up at any moment. Now Lena had noticed them and crossed over from the far wall.

“If Kane’s here,”Takahashi said,“we can use him. He can stop Curtis. It’s what he was programmed for.”

Molly turned slowly and looked at the shadows that clung to the walls of the cave, the clutter of equipment and furniture.The idea that Kane was out there somewhere, dazed, obsessive, a pawn to the biotechnology in his brain, gave her chills.

“Kane’s programming is screwed up,” Lena said.“He’s living out some kind of Greek mythology fantasy.We can’t count on him.”

“Can we count on you?” Takahashi asked.

“Depends on what you want,” Lena said, and Molly could see the claustrophobic tension of the flight from Earth in her sudden anger. “I’m with you against Curtis.”

“Then somebody,” Molly said,“for Christ’s sake think of something. There’s less than an hour left.”

“What about her?” Takahashi asked, pointing at Hanai.

“I’ll help,” Hanai said.“But I want protection from Curtis.Whatever it takes, even if it means taking me back to Earth.”

“You’ll be okay,” Molly said.

“That’s not good enough. I want a promise.”

“I promise,”Molly said.“I’ll do whatever I can to protect you from him.”

“I want to know where Kane is,”Takahashi said.“I still think he’s our best chance.”

“He’s here,” Lena said.“He was coming here, anyway.”

“Then I’m going to look for him.” Takahashi pulled off his suit and moved quietly into the darkness.

“We better break this up,” Hanai said. She was looking past Molly’s left shoulder, and Molly turned to see one of the other guards moving toward them. It was Iain—whose hero thing, Molly remembered, had been a solo rover expedition to the Mutch Memorial Station, site of the first Viking landing, where he’d snapped off the soil sampling arm and brought it back as a trophy.

“What’s this about?” he said, and Molly shook her head at him.

“Nothing,” she said.

“Let’s just get away from this hatch, then, eh?” he said.“And you, Molly, come back with me. I want you where I can keep my eyes on you.” He put one hand on Molly’s arm, and she shook him away fiercely.

“Don’t touch me.”

He held up both hands.“Right. Just let’s move along, okay?”

She walked away from him, crossed the cluttered floor to stand next to Curtis. He and Alonzo were staring at an odd-shaped polygon on the crt.The shape reminded her of an Apollo spacecraft for a second, the heat-shield pointed slightly up and to the right.Then she noticed the fainter lines surrounding it.

The Kremlin, then, and the upper right corner was Red Square.

“Phenomenal,” Curtis said.“Un-fucking-believable.”

“Curtis,” Molly said.

“Don’t start.”

“Will you listen to me for just thirty seconds? Will you think about what you’re doing? Do you think this is some kind of video game you’re playing?”

Curtis glanced up from the screen, checking the disposition of his troops.“Iain,” he said,“shut her up, will you?”

She glared at Iain, who shifted his feet uncomfortably.“What exactly do you want me to do with her?”

Curtis handed him the Luger.“Take her out of my way and watch her. Use the gun if you have to, but for Christ’s sake don’t hit any of the equipment.”

“That’s right, Iain,” Molly said.“You wouldn’t want to damage anything valuable.”

Curtis turned in his chair to stare at her with a look of angry impa

tience.“Shut up.” Above the crt a digital display clock read 23:11. Nineteen minutes left.

Moscow coming in,” Chaadayev said. “All right,” Mayakenska said into the radio. Her heart was pounding and she didn’t know whether to be terrified or to try, somehow, to pray.

“Mademoiselle Mayakenska,” the voice said. She recognized it as belonging to the vice president with the colored glasses and the dzhinsi pants. She nearly answered him, forgetting the eighteen minutes it would take her words to reach Earth.

“The Committee—or rather, the Board—has decided not to take your advice. It is our conclusion that the mechanism is located somewhere within Frontera Base itself, and not in some distant cave.We find the idea that such a device could be the work of children to be preposterous.”

“Idiots,” Mayakenska said.Tears of anger ran down her face.“Idiots.”

“Therefore your instructions are as follows. If Curtis seems set on his threat you will destroy Frontera Base with the laser.You will do so before the expiration of Curtis’s deadline, and you will do so without telling anyone there on the ground.Also, from this moment forward I expect you to maintain a continuous radio link with Mission Control, detailing all your actions. I trust this is all sufficiently clear.”

“Chaadayev?” Mayakenska said. He was the one who would actually have to fire the laser.“Were you listening?”

“Yes,” Chaadayev said.

“They’re insane.You’ve seen what the weapon can do. I want you to make the ship ready to leave orbit.”

“I’m sorry,” Chaadayev said.

“What does that mean?”

“I agree with Moscow. Besides, it isn’t my place to question orders. I suggest that you already be in your suit when you make your final communication with Curtis. Have Valentin in the ship, ready to go.We’ll

start with the north end of the dome at 23:25 exactly, which will give you time to get to the ship and rendezvous with us.” “Chaadayev, I order you to disable the weapon and lay in a course

for home.” “I am genuinely sorry,” Chaadayev said.The radio went dead. Mayakenska looked at her watch.Ten forty-five.The ship was locked,

all systems powered up, ready for immediate launch in case of an emergency.With constant thrust and a low trajectory, she might make it. The living room was still dark.Valentin paced the floor, pretending

nonchalance.“I trust you overheard,” she said to him. He glared at her, then shrugged.“Only by accident.” She had no time to waste on this feinting for position.“Your opinion?” “It’s not my duty to have an opinion.” She nodded and went to Blok’s room. He slept with his mouth open,

his face bruised and lined with pain. She shook him gently. “Hmmm...what?” “Blok, listen carefully.At eleven fifteen, that’s just half an hour from

now, I want you to go outside. Go to the nearest alarm and push the

Abandon button. Do you understand me?” “Abandon?” he asked groggily.“What’s happening? Why—” “You must trust me, Do not let anyone or anything keep you from

doing this.” He sat up, holding his neck and twisting his head to pop the vertebrae.

“They’re going to burn the dome, aren’t they?” “Don’t ask questions. Be a soldier.Will you do this for me?” “Yes, but—” She touched his lips with one finger.“Once you’ve sounded the

alarm, if you can...see that Valentin gets out alive. If you can.” “Your lover,” Blok said. Mayakenska shrugged. “Ah, my colonel, you have such a weakness for lost children. I’ll do

what I can.” She left him. “I’m going outside,” she said to Valentin.“I want to take a closer look

at that rock.There must be no possibility of a mistake.” “I’ll go with you,” he said, reaching for a mask. “No,” she said.“There’s...another broadcast at 2300 hours.” “What difference does that make now?”

“Everything,” she said,“must be as usual. Do you understand?”

“All right,” he said.

“The call sign is Taymyr. 2300 hours.”

She ran for the airlock. Her legs, swollen and aching from the blood that gravity had pulled into them, would not obey her brain. She tripped over nothing and rolled into a soggy field of young spinach. She came up with ammonia fertilizer soaked into her coveralls and one ankle painfully twisted.

She limped into the changing room, forcing herself into a suit and through the airlock.The wind was a genuine force now, buffeting her, throwing her weight onto the bad ankle.All she could smell inside the suit was the bitter tang of ammonia and the stink of her own fear.

She fell down twice in the darkness. She could still see the lights of Frontera behind her, keeping her from losing her direction, but she could not find her ship.

She bumped headlong into something metal, squinted, and saw it was the American lander. Hers was not far away, then. She staggered on, and a moment later she saw the circle of light leaking from the porthole.

Clinging to the side of the spacecraft, the wind ripping silently at her arms and legs, she pried open the cover of the magnetic lock. Her fingers fumbled the combination, cleared the memory, tried again. Every second, she thought, every mistake, could be the one that lost her her chance.

The hatch opened and she climbed in, surrounded by swirling dust. She slammed the hatch and fell into the pilot’s sling, her fingers already snapping switches on the panel above her.

Stop them, was all she could think. Further back in her mind she knew she might be too late, but she refused to deal with that thought until she had to. For now she only wanted to get to the Salyut, get on board, and stop them from firing the laser.

Any way she had to.

The computer released its hold on the countdown with 15 seconds left. She frantically punched in the parameters for the fastest possible ascent to the Salyut, stopping only to buckle her harness as the first jolt of acceleration shook the ship.

The winds boiled around her, hammering the shell of the ship with rocks and dirt, threatening to destroy the careful balance of engine thrust and send her tumbling out of control. She fought the T-shaped pitch and yaw control for stability, trusting her dangerously atrophied

instincts to keep her right side up.

“Climb, you prick,” she whispered.

The G forces leaned into her, sickening her, and within seconds she was out of the turbulence.

Gently she took her hands away from the controls and let the computer guide her into a low, fast orbit. Lifeless, frozen wastes flew past the windows as she hurtled toward the sunrise, thinking, I did what I could.

She wished she could believe it would be enough.

Kane ripped open the front of his chest pack and took out the Colt. The boy who called himself Pen of My Uncle shrank against the wall of the cave.“Oh shit,” he said.

Kane ignored him,The gun completed a neural circuit, and he could see one step further ahead. First the circuit board and then, he knew, the rest would come to him.

He circled toward the ladder, and the boy scurried away toward the opposite side of the cave.

Someone was already climbing toward him.

Kane eased back into the darkness, the gun in front of him, his gloved finger snug in the trigger guard.

“Kane?” said Takahashi.“Kane, are you up here?”

“Come on up,” Kane said.“Move slowly and don’t do anything to make me nervous.”

Takahashi clambered up onto the catwalk and stood uneasily, keeping his hands away from his body. He was sweating and his nostrils flared with suppressed tension. Kane had never seen him so nearly out of control.

“You okay?” Takahashi said.

“Okay?” Kane asked.“Okay? What the fuck do you think, man? You and my uncle have been using me like I was one of the robots out of his factory.You move me around like a piece of furniture, you even try to reprogram my fucking brain, and you ask me if I’m okay?”

“Easy,”Takahashi said.“You think I set you up for this?”

“You knew about it.You spent nine months in your rowing machine, knowing they were still alive up here, knowing about that goddamned circuit in my head, knowing about this machine that...that scrambled Reese and just blew him away...” His metabolism was devouring itself. He mopped sweat from his forehead and wiped at his running nose.

Takahashi was not much better off. His eyes kept flickering toward the figures moving below them.“You were dying.The implant operation saved your life.” His sincerity was urgent, frightened.“As to the programming that went in it, that’s Morgan’s doing.”

“What’s the difference? I’ve seen your file.That whole corporate loyalty thing. Morgan owns you just as much as he does me, only he doesn’t need any chips in your brain to do it.”

“Kane.There isn’t much time...”

Kane turned the gun so that the dim light rolled and shimmered off the metal.“Right now all you’ve got is the time I let you have. I could kill you right now.”

“I’m not your enemy, Kane. Neither is the company.”

He had shifted into a sudden, intense calm that Kane found more frightening than his earlier display of nerves.

“In Japan,”Takahashi said,“the company was my mother and father. You think Pulsystems is big in Houston, but that’s nothing compared to Japan. It was the Japanese division that supported the entire corporation for the last ten years.

“And over there we didn’t just work for a paycheck.The company fed me and gave me my house and clothes and car, and it gave me something to believe in and work for and devote myself to. Morgan doesn’t do that. Morgan is an egotistical, devious incompetent.”

Kane’s gun hand began to tremble. Bright filaments of pain glowed inside his skull and sweat ran down the sides of his chest.“I don’t understand.”

“I’m loyal to the company, not to Morgan.There are factions that believe this transporter and this antimatter power grid are too valuable to let Morgan have.They got me onto this mission to protect them, and when I get back Morgan will be replaced.As soon as they can find a successor that the Board will accept.”

“Successor?”

“Don’t play coy with me.You know who I’m talking about.”

“I don’t...”

“You’ve wanted it all along.You’ve been maneuvering yourself toward it since your first summer job in the mail room.And Morgan knew it. He’s used the implant to keep you down since North Africa, and he sent you up here because he didn’t think you’d ever come back, or if you did you wouldn’t be in any position to fight him.”

“Maybe he’s right.This thing in my head...”

“Once this is over with, once the program has terminated, it won’t make any difference.You can just leave the current rom in there, or you can make it work for you.”

“How? What are you talking about?”

“You could set up a direct brain link to the Pulsystems computers, and access all their storage.You could expand your mental powers, your senses.The possibilities are endless.”

Kane rubbed his sweaty, throbbing forehead with the glove of his left hand.“You’re an optimist,Takahashi. First we have to live through tonight, and the Russians...”

“There’s more than the Russians to worry about. Curtis is out of his mind, and he’s down there right now trying to start World War III.”

“Curtis,” Kane said.

“With him out of the way, we can take the panel and get back to Houston.Then nothing can stop us.”

“The Return,” Kane said.

“What?”

“The Pattern, man, the life-enhancing Return...”

“Forget this pattern shit.There’s no time.” Takahashi’s calm was visibly eroding.“Stop Curtis. Get the panel.You’ve got to be the one to do it.You’ve got the gun, the reflexes, all that berserker shit they taught you in the mercenaries. I’ll tell the Russians we’re ready to deal, stall them long enough for us to get to the ship and get out of here.”

“That is the Pattern, man. Slay the monster and return with the Ultimate Boon.That is the Pattern.”

Takahashi looked as if he wanted to smash the wall with his fists. He’s starting to believe what I said about the implant, Kane thought. He really is starting to believe I’ve lost it.

“I’m sorry, Kane,”Takahashi said,“I didn’t want it to be like this. But I can’t take him all by myself. None of us can.”

“What are you—” Kane said, but Takahashi had already closed his eyes and begun to recite.

“ ‘When I am grown to man’s estate/I shall be very proud and great/ And tell the other girls and boys/Not to meddle with my toys.’”

Kane was paralyzed. Part of his brain recognized the nursery rhyme his uncle had read to him as a child, before his father died, but another, distinct part read the words as a lock reads a key and opened under them.

He watched as his left hand wrapped around his right, steadying his grip on the pistol, both thumbs cocking the hammer, a shining, live cartridge moving into line with the barrel.

Program, he thought, watching helplessly as his feet took him toward the ladder. Last-ditch program.Takahashi. Bastard. Didn’t believe I could do it.

He put one foot onto the ladder, carefully brought his left hand from the Colt to the railing.

He took a second step, and a third. His shoulders were level with the floor of the catwalk.

A blast of sound nearly blew him off the ladder. He jammed his hands over his ears and the revolver fell into a pile of plastic sheeting below him.

Alarms were going off all across the cave. Reese had drilled them on the three different sound patterns; this one, the shrill, one-note siren, was the signal to abandon the dome.

He could think again, had some voluntary control over his body. But the compulsion remained, the driving, overwhelming need to point the gun at Curtis’s face, to squeeze the trigger, to watch him die.

The alarm shrieked at him from less than five feet away, from a metal horn mounted on the catwalk support, battering him with sound. Frenzied, disoriented, he thrashed from side to side on the ladder, trying to see where the gun had fallen.

He felt the slick plastic elbow joints of his suit begin to slide off the rung of the ladder and lunged for the handrail, but he was too late.

He tumbled backwards off the ladder, his scream of terror lost in the maelstrom of noise.

What’s it?” Curtis asked. “That’s it,”Verb told him.“Type .run xlaunch, hit newline, and the machine does the rest.”

She looked eaten up inside, Molly thought, worse than she’d ever looked before. She stood near Curtis now, and refused to even look in Molly’s direction.

Curtis turned away from the keyboard with a look of regret and picked up the phone.“You still have the Russians on the screen?...Yeah, fine...Oh really?...What were they saying?...You what? Jesus Christ, you asshole, why didn’t you tell me you don’t speak Russian? Get somebody in there who does, for Christ’s sake, and replay those goddamn radio signals!” He slammed the phone down and turned to Alonzo.“Those fucking morons—”

The abandon alarm cut him off.

Christ, Molly thought, momentarily stunned.They did it, they hit Frontera, they didn’t even wait for the deadline...

She saw Curtis lunge for the crt and knew her options had run out.

Iain was half turned toward Curtis and didn’t see her until she was already coming off the floor. Her first punch caught him in the throat, and he went down choking.

She didn’t have time to try for his gun.

Curtis stood in front of the keyboard, legs spread. He was typing, carefully, one letter at a time.

“Curtis!” she screamed, but her voice was drowned in the shrilling of the alarms.

Curtis reached for the newline key.

She had nothing to throw, no weapon to use but her body. She hurled herself at his legs, knocking him off balance, and as they fell over together, she saw his right hand come down.

Curtis had fallen underneath her. She got to her hands and knees, saw green letters scrolling up the screen of the crt.

xlaunch was running.The metal doorway began to swirl with color, washing out the dark blue of the ceramic canister that lay balanced inside it.

She got to her feet, felt Curtis’s hands close around her left ankle. Her right leg was free and she pulled it back, then drove the point of her toe between his legs, using all her strength.

He must have screamed, but she couldn’t hear it. He thrashed and shook like a drowning fish, and she pulled her leg free and ran for the Japanese screen in the center of the room.

“Molly, no!”Verb’s voice, higher, louder than the sirens.

With her gloved hands she grabbed the power board and yanked it loose from its connections.

The voltage kicked her ten feet across the floor, sparks dancing in front of her eyes and smoke trickling from the forearms of her suit. She couldn’t breathe, but air wasn’t what she wanted. She wanted to see...

She pulled herself up, literally crawling up the side of the wall.

The canister was still there.

Thank God, Molly thought.That much saved; that many more that didn’t have to die.

The dome, she thought. Had the Russians really done it?

She couldn’t stay on her feet. She slumped to the floor, one foot sending the power board skittering away across the durofoam.

The sirens wound down and the sudden silence hit Molly like a physical blow. She passed out for a moment, and when she forced her eyes open again, she could see Curtis moving toward her.

“—the panel back in and we’ll have another go,” he was shouting to Alonzo. He had the gun again, and now he was looking at her.“And you, bitch, are going to die.”

She put out one hand, tried to lever herself up. Her muscles had no strength.As her fingers clutched uselessly at the durofoam floor, she saw Verb, standing behind a row of machines, watching her.

Curtis picked up the panel and held it under one arm. He brought the gun up, and Molly watched numbly as his elbow locked and his shoulder moved in toward his chin.

Somebody stepped in front of her, and she couldn’t see Curtis anymore.

“No, Curtis,” Lena said.“It’s over.”

“Over?” Curtis, said.“They destroyed the dome, they killed God knows how many people, and you say it’s over?”

Molly felt a hand pulling at her and managed to stand up long enough to brace herself against the rear wall of the cave.The touch of the fingers was strange, hesitant, and Molly looked over into the face of her daughter.

“I’m sorry,”Verb said.The girl’s eyes were red, but she had stopped crying,“I screwed everything up. I just got so hurt and angry, and I...”

“It happens,” Molly said, the words coming out a little breathlessly. “You’re just human, that’s all.”

“I don’t know if I like that,”Verb said.There was a tension around her eyes, a distance that had never been there before. She’s growing up, Molly thought. She hasn’t got long now at all.

“I know,” Molly said.“I know.And I’m sorry, too. I shouldn’t have kept anything from you.Whatever...whatever time we have left, I’ll try to do better.”

“Okay,”Verb said.The pressure of the girl’s hand on her shoulder was strong, comforting. I can’t remember the last time, Molly thought, she touched me on her own.

Curtis was staring at Alonzo.“Come put this panel back in,” he said, “while I watch these assholes.”

Alonzo stayed where he was, behind the crt. Molly heard the beep as he switched it off.“They’re right, Curtis.This is where it has to stop.”

“I don’t believe it,” Curtis said.“I don’t fucking believe it.You’re going to just lie there and let this happen to you? I could kill you all.”

“Not all of us,” Hanai said, moving over to stand near Lena.“One or two of us, but not all of us.”

Curtis began to back away, toward the airlock.“I know what you think, all of you.You think I’m the Fisher King or something, that I’m all dried up, that maybe you can sacrifice me and get a new king and everything will be okay again.” He stepped into the bottom half of his suit, and then he had to put the panel down to get into the upper half.

“It’s easy to blame me,” he went on.“But it wasn’t my fault. I never lost my faith. I always believed we could change this place, and I still believe it.” He picked up the panel again and held it over his head. “With this kind of power we could have started those changes months ago, maybe even years ago. But you kept it from me, you refused to trust me with it. But now I have it, and I’m going to build the new Mars I promised.And if you won’t help me, I’ll find somebody else who can.”

“How many have to die first?” Molly said. She reached her right arm across and held onto Verb’s hand for just a second, then took a couple of shaky steps away from her.“We can’t build a new world and then turn it into Earth all over again, with factions and war and bombs...”

Curtis’s expression was feral, crazed, a cornered animal’s. He put on one glove at a time, keeping the gun up and trained on the room with the other hand.

“Even Morgan,” he said,“even Morgan would not be this stupid. He’d know what to do with power like this.” He grabbed a helmet and slid into the airlock feet first.

The ship, Molly thought. He was going to take Reese’s ship.

He could do it, too—any of them could; in an emergency, it would only take a single crewman to get the lander back up to Deimos, to refuel the Mission Module, to pilot the big ship all the way back to Earth.

“Don’t—” she said, but the hatch had already closed, and the indicator over the door flashed red.

No one else seemed to understand what was happening.They stood frozen in place, their shoulders starting to relax, Frontera forgotten, Curtis dismissed.

Somewhere she found the strength to walk. She looked at the charred spots on her gloves, couldn’t see any serious damage to the suit. She pushed a helmet over her head and got a green telltale on her chest pack at the same time she started the pumps to fill the airlock.

She looked back, saw the others starting to move, the fear taking hold in their faces, but she couldn’t hear them in the sealed environment of the suit.The airlock light went green, and she opened the hatch and got inside and slammed it shut again.

The wait seemed impossibly long, but there were no thoughts at all in her mind, just an agonizing awareness of how slowly time was moving. And then, finally, the outer hatch cycled open, and she crawled out into a hell of blowing sand.

Hydraulics drew the hatch shut behind her. She took a few staggering steps into the night, unable to see anything but the billowing dust in the light of her helmet. She switched off the lamp and let the darkness close in around her.

There, in the distance, barely visible through the storm, were the lights of Frontera.

She dropped to her knees and held onto a chunk of frozen lava, weak with relief.There was time yet.

“Hello?” she said into her suit radio.“Hello, is, anybody monitoring?” She fumbled with the switch on top of her chest pack and tried the emergency frequency.“Mayday, for Christ’s sake, somebody answer me!”

No one there. Of course not, the alarm had gone off, they had abandoned the dome. She tried the short-range frequency again.“This

is Molly, I need to get through to Mayakenska, is she there? For God’s sake, if you can hear me—”

“Mayakenska is gone,” said a voice in her ear. She thought she recognized the voice of the other Russian, the tall blond.

“Gone?”

“It is too late,”the voice said.“There is nothing you can do to stop it now.”

“No,” Molly said. She stood up again, lost her balance, and rolled four or five meters down the slope.“No, you have to stop them—”

She looked up to see a line of ruby light, narrow as a spotlight beam, connect Frontera to the sky overhead.

“No,” she screamed, and then she screamed again without words.

It was not a spectacular death.Where the laser cut through a living module there was a tiny burst of flame, barely visible from where Molly lay; before the fire could spread, the carbon dioxide smothered it.The beam moved steadily down the length of the dome, then crossed it from side to side.

Molly saw the Center explode, a brighter flare that sent glowing chunks of concrete into the dust and darkness.And finally, just before it disappeared, the creeping line of red touched the reserve oxygen tanks in the north wall and melted them in a hot, blue sphere of fire.

She hardly noticed when the airlock opened and a single, suited figure came out, wearing an infrared helmet and carrying a gun in its hand.“Kane?” she said, but the helmet only paused for a second as its gaze swept past her, and no one answered.The figure bounded down the slope and disappeared into the swirling sand.

Molly leaned against the rock and closed her eyes. She was still there when the first of the survivors began to climb past her toward the cave.

Twenty miles from the Salyut, when it had just become a point light-source on her screens, Mayakenska fired her retros.

She wanted to keep the thrust at maximum, to ram them out of the sky, but her common sense held her back.And then she saw the hair-thin line of red wink into existence and she knew that it would not have made any difference, that nothing she could have done would have mattered.

They had been ignoring her signals but now she tried again.“This is Mayakenska.You must stop this attack.You must—” She broke off in rage and frustration, trying to slam her fist into the control panel.With no weight behind it the gesture was feeble and meaningless, serving only to wrench her shoulders off to the right and nearly spin her out of her chair.

She forced herself to lean back into the sling, tighten her straps against the negligible thrust of the retros, and concentrate on the upcoming rendezvous.

She’d swept across the daylight side of Mars, over the western edge of the Elysium Planitia and the Syrtis Major Planitia in twenty minutes, watching the digital propellant gauge counting backwards toward empty tanks and the various forms that disaster could take. One by one she watched the gruesome possibilities put to rest: not enough fuel to reach escape velocity, not enough height to reach the Salyut, not enough thrust for the retros.

Now she only had the docking to worry about, and that no longer mattered.

She had defied her superiors, gambled against time, and lost. In the old days she would have become a non-person, pensioned out or even sent to a gulag as an example. She wondered what the current equivalent would be; a desk job in Yakutsk, or perhaps an auto accident on an empty stretch of road?

Gently she nosed the ship into a higher, slower orbit as she closed on the green, tapering cylinder of the Salyut. Once her greatest pleasure had been the hours she’d bought on the simulators with her position, her blat. Now she flew the actual ship with less feeling than she’d had on the dullest hour in training, as far beyond emotion as she was beyond fatigue.

With cautious puffs of hydrazine from her attitude jets, she brought the nose of the lander into the Salyut berth, feeling the latches click solidly into place.

She reached for the toggle switches that would pump air into the tunnel between the lander and the Salyut, and then stopped her hand halfway there.

What you’re thinking, she told herself, is murder.Worse than murder, it’s treason.

And what do you call the cold-blooded destruction of the dome? she asked. Russians died down there, not just Americans and Japanese.

She moved her arm back to her side. She felt the feverish chill of sweat drying on her forehead and cheeks. It’s not something, she thought, that you talk yourself into. It’s an emotional decision, and you know you’re not going to do it now; you’ve lost the impulse. So go ahead and turn those switches, pump in the air, finish all the seals. Don’t think about the other possibilities.

Her radio crackled.“Mademoiselle Mayakenska, please complete your seal on the tunnel.You are hereby ordered to place yourself under arrest and surrender the landing vehicle—”

In a rush of anger and despair, her hands shot to the console and typed in a series of numbers. Numbers Chaadayev would never have heard of, numbers known only to the most senior ground personnel. The computer asked her to verify the order and she did it.

The explosive bolts that held the air lock hatch in place blew off in silence, shaking the lander like a rabbit in the jaws of a dog. But the latches held her firmly to the Salyut, and in a few seconds everything was still again.

Three men had died, the air sucked from their lungs, the moisture leached from their skin, their eyes nearly blown from their sockets.

Murdered.

She closed her eyes.

Go on, she thought.You can’t stop here. It’s too late to bring them back, to undo any of this. So take it one step at a time.

But finish it.

She removed the hatch from the nose of the lander and crawled through into the long, narrow hallway of the Salyut.The air of the ship seemed to be filled with stars, winking between the orbiting bodies of the three dead cosmonauts; after a second or two Mayakenska realized the lights were tiny, frozen crystals of blood.

She brushed past Chaadayev’s corpse and patched her helmet radio into the transmitter.“Dawn, this is Zenith. Zenith calling Dawn. Mayakenska here.The American base is destroyed. I regret to report that our information was inaccurate, they—” She stopped, took her finger off the transmit button to get her breath, then started again.

“The transporter did not—does not exist. I...examined the rock which was supposedly destroyed by the antimatter. I found traces of plastic explosive and indications that others of the rocks had been similarly wired. It was...only a hoax.”

She released the button again.And now what? The lander was out of fuel, but even if she could get back to the surface, what kind of life could she have there? Curtis would still be alive, sheltered by the rock walls of his cave, and he would hold her accountable.

For that matter, without the dome, what kind of life would any of them have?

Her eyes came to rest on the propellant gauge, reminding her that the outboard tanks had been filled at the Phobos station. She had more than enough fuel to get back to Earth, but that, she thought, watching the frozen corpses in their grisly pas de trois, was no longer an alternative.

She tried to remember. How big a crater would it take? Deep enough to hold in two or three hundred millibars of pressure, at least three or four kilometers deep.Would the fuel tanks, pushed by the mass of the Salyut, protected by the carbon-carbon heat shield of the lander, make that big an explosion?

She didn’t know.

If not, she thought, then let it be a gesture.A first, halting step.

“Zenith to Dawn.We are preparing to leave orbit.”She flicked the power switch on and off to create static in the transmission. “Dawn, there is a problem with our attitude control. Repeat, we are experiencing—”

She switched the radio off, then smashed it with a wrench. No backing out, she told herself. She would display no lack of moral certainty.

A little hardship would now be required.

She programmed the computer for a course that would take her into the Solis Planum, the frozen wasteland they used to call Solis Lacus, the Lake of the Sun.The buried ice there would melt and add to the explosion, releasing precious gasses into the air. For an instant its name would become the literal truth, and it would burn with the brightness and heat of a star.

If Blok had sounded the alarm, then there would be survivors.That cave was the original settlement; it had supported the colony before the dome was built, and it could support them again until they moved to their new home.

For one final time she felt the pull of gravity as the Salyut dove into the Martian atmosphere, the thin air screaming against the lander’s heat shield.

She listened as the long, high note climbed the scale and held at a perfect B above high C.

Kane felt the impact in his ribs and the muscles of his neck, no more, really, than a burst of light and a second of galvanic shock. He rolled onto his hands and knees and let the blood flow into his brain.

The noise of the alarms was so great that Kane could no longer hear the high harmony of his voices. For the first time since they’d touched down on Mars—had it been only a day and a half ago?—he had his mind to himself.

It made little difference. Even without the compulsion from the implant, his course was obvious: kill Curtis, steal the panel, return to Earth, and bring justice to his uncle.

The sirens faltered for a second, and Kane saw a vision of depthless crystal seas fouled with blood, of butchered flesh in the wake of the ship. He saw the dusty yard of a monastery and a filthy, bearded monk on his knees, praying for the waters to be released.

The sirens stopped, and the compulsion seized him again with fierce inevitability. He burrowed through the sheets of black plastic, searching for his gun, hearing only the voices in his head and not the ones across the cave from him, muted indistinct noises with no semantic content.

The implant worked on his adrenal gland as well, renewing the effect of Lena’s adrenogen. He felt the chill of norepinephrins constricting his blood vessels; his kidneys ached from the tension of the surrounding musculature.

He saw the gun.

His hand closed around it and he stood up, dizzy, edgy, barely in control. He saw Curtis by the airlock, putting on a helmet, and he raised the Colt until the sight covered Curtis’s neck. Before he could fire, Curtis had moved, turning and jackknifing into the lock.

He remembered the storm, though the image in his mind was muddled, confused with gray waves and clashing rocks. But he knew he needed the infrared helmet, could remember having thrown it somewhere near where he stood.

By the time he found the helmet, Molly had gone through after Curtis. Kane ran for the hatch, pushing Hanai to one side.A voice behind him said,“He’s got a gun!” as he slammed the helmet in place and dived into the airlock.

The inside of the lock was smeared with the heat of the bodies that had just passed through it. He tapped the butt of the gun against the curved metal floor of the cylinder, his right leg shaking to the rhythm.

The hatch opened. He slid out and stared toward Frontera, at the blinding column of white light that overloaded the contrast sensors of his helmet, reducing the rest of the planet to deep green.

“Son of a bitch,” he said, only realizing he’d vocalized it when he saw the droplets of spittle on the inside of his helmet.

He turned his head downward, blocking the worst of the light with his hands, and made out Curtis as a dull yellow blotch moving down the slope.A few yards away Molly lay with her knees drawn up almost to her chin, as close to a fetal position as the clumsy rigid suit would allow.

Kane moved down the side of the volcano, his feet turned sideways for better traction, each leap jolting his ribcage and firing off telegrams of pain.The laser had vanished, and the ruins of the dome glittered in oily white heat, bringing the foreground back into focus, the cold lumps of rock, the molten patch where the Russian ship had been, the warm orange of Kane’s own ship, the dull red of Curtis’s suit and the brighter red of the panel under Curtis’s arm.

He could hear Curtis’s heavy breathing through the speakers in his helmet. It would be bad for Curtis, in the darkness and chaos of the storm, and Kane knew it was his one advantage. If he failed to catch Curtis before they got to the ruins of the dome...

No, he realized. It wasn’t the dome Curtis wanted. It was the ship.

He forced himself into longer, more reckless leaps, and he forgot the strength of the wind. It unbalanced him as his legs reached for an open square of ground and threw him too far forward, sent him falling endlessly toward the rocks, so slowly that he had time to wrap his arms around his chest before he hit.The rigid suit bounced and rolled, rattling him inside it like dice in a cup.

The lights on his chest pack still glowed, but his infrared scanner could not distinguish between red and green.The suit was all right, he

told himself. If it were compromised, he would already know.

Get up, he told himself.

He got up.

Curtis was nearly to the ascent stage of the ship, but Kane had picked up a few yards on him. He could see the articulation of Curtis’s suit in shades of red, see the man’s arms stretched blindly in front of him.

And behind him came new shapes, a dozen or more suited refugees from the dome, stumbling toward Curtis, toward the ship, toward the mouth of Kane’s gun.

“Curtis!” Kane shouted.

Curtis stopped, turned halfway back toward the cave.

Kane ran at him, holding the gun in front of him. He was a hundred feet away, eighty, sixty. He slowed himself, feet skidding in the dust, almost falling again and sighted down the barrel of the Colt.

Now, he thought, now, quickly, before there are too many others underfoot, now while you have a clean shot.

Something was making his helmet vibrate.

He looked to his right, to the south and east, and saw a tiny ball of flame rip through the sky. It vanished into the horizon near the Syria Planum and a moment later a perfect hemisphere of molten white rose like a new sun.

An asteroid? Kane wondered. If so, it had been enormous, and the impact must have been devastating.

He whirled back to face Curtis and saw him climbing the side of the lander.

“Curtis!” he shouted again, and he fired the Colt, missing Curtis and leaving a white hot streak where the bullet had grazed the spacecraft. Before he could fire again, Curtis dropped to the ground behind the ship and disappeared.

The radio band hissed and rattled with the frightened voices of the refugees; Kane switched his receiver off and ran after Curtis. He dodged between the stumbling automatons who’d been left night-blind and disoriented by the storm, following the retreating image of Curtis’s suit. The heat of the ruins was closer now; the analytical circuitry of the helmet dropped Curtis to a dull yellow in comparison. Kane yearned for another shot, but had no chance in the milling crowd.

Curtis had broken for the eastern side of the dome, dodging through a gaping, melted wound in the wall. Kane slowed to walk, his lungs burning, his concentration breaking down.

The dome was ravaged, mangled beyond repair. Superheated gasses had blown globs and droplets of molten plastic for hundreds of yards in all directions, leaving only a few hundred square feet of limp, opaque plastic over the burned and frozen fields.

Something moved in a gap in the wall and Kane almost fired, then saw that it was a child in a low-pressure shuttle suit. From the obvious pain in her motion Kane could see that the four psi oxygen in the suit had left her with the bends, excruciating bubbles of nitrogen in the joints of her arms and legs.

There was nothing Kane could do for her; if she got to the cave in time, the pain would eventually go away.

There would only be worse inside the ruined dome.

The first thing he saw as he stepped through the wall was a corpse, embolized, nearly as cold as the ground beneath Kane’s feet.A few yards away lay a hand, with no sign of the body it belonged to.

Kane was sweating heavily. He had no idea where Curtis was; at any moment the man could circle back and blend in with the others heading uphill toward the cave. Kane turned constantly to check his back, and at least once every minute he stumbled back outside to make sure the ship was still there.

When the rumbling started under his feet he thought it was a hallucination.Then he saw that the brown, spongy walls of the shattered living modules were quaking and that bits of congealed plastic were falling from overhead.

No one was left alive inside the dome. He saw a flash of heat and fired at it, then saw that it was only a jet of warm air escaping from a sealed room.

His knees shook from the vibration underfoot.A high-tensile aluminum strut tumbled gently to the ground just in front of him, shattering frozen stalks of corn as if they were stained glass sculptures.

He had to get out. He ran for the nearest break in the wall and saw a pane of plastic explode a few inches away from his head. Curtis, he thought, aiming at the noise Kane had made. He threw himself forward and rolled, bringing the gun up as he fell.

Nothing moved.

I can’t stand this, Kane thought.The roaring was in his ears now, coming up through the soil and vibrating the air in his suit. He pushed himself up on his elbows and saw Curtis running for the ship.

The survivors, a few dozen of them at most, were bright dots on the slope leading up to the cave. No bystanders, Kane thought, no more mistakes.

The shockwave came up out of the southeast at the speed of sound, a white-hot tidal wave of dust and ash and volatile gasses ten miles high. It picked Kane up and flung him against the wall of the broken dome so hard that he blacked out for an instant, and when he came around he was stunned, overwhelmed by the deafening chorus of voices in his brain, hurting in at least a dozen parts of his body.

He saw the lander still, somehow, standing upright on the plain.

He saw Curtis get to his feet and run for the hatch of the lander, the panel still hanging from one arm.

He raised the gun and fired, saw Curtis clutch his leg and go down.

He pulled the hammer back, watching globular patterns of reflected heat crawl across the visor of Curtis’s helmet.

He fired again, saw the visor split and the face behind it explode, spraying steam and tiny droplets of blood into the churning air.

The gun tumbled out of Kane’s limp fingers. He pushed himself away from the wall, took one step, then another. He stumbled, went to his knees, got up and walked some more.

The first time he tried to pull the panel from Curtis’s fingers he lost his balance and went down again, his knees hitting Curtis’s chest in an accidental echo of his own broken ribs, his helmet thumping into the ruin of Curtis’s face as his momentum carried him forward. He tugged again and the panel came free.

It’s over, he thought. He stood on the threshold of the Return, the conceptual rebirth. He put one hand on the ladder, pulled one leg onto the bottom rung. Back to Earth with the panel. Kill the king, marry the princess.

He shook his head.There was no princess.What was he thinking of ?

“Takahashi?” he said. His radio was off.

He pulled himself another step up the ladder. He thought of the curvature of the ship’s orbit, a Hohmann ellipse that would match the one that had brought him here and complete the circle, perfect the symmetry.

Curtis lay in the dust beneath him like the monk he’d seen in his dreams, desiccated, shattered, the promise of his Pattern betrayed.

The body in the wake of the ship, Medea’s brother Aegialeus, butchered to delay Aeetes’ vengeance; the embolized victims inside the ruptured dome. Morgan owns you, Lena said. Symmetry breaking, the beginning of life.When I am grown to a man’s estate.

He slammed his helmet into the side of the ship, waking himself up. Somewhere in the back of his skull the biological circuit whispered to him in neural languages that his conscious mind could not hear; sweet, irresistible voices that told him to take the panel, to lift the ship.

Yamato-Takeru knew, Kane thought; he’d felt his spirit stolen away from him, just like this.

Every separate human life, the boy had said.A moment of the life of some great being which lives in us.

The membrane parted again, and Kane saw them all, Jason and Percival and the hundreds of other human lives and the single Pattern they formed, the single act they performed again and again, outside time, each of them with a unique moment, a contribution.

Kane knew what his had to be.

Molly was still sitting on the cliffside when Kane found her. He had remembered to turn his radio on again, but he couldn’t find the words that he needed.

Takahashi stood next to her, with three or four others. In the aftermath of the shockwave, the dust had settled and the night was turning clear.

“It was the Russian ship,” Takahashi said. Kane looked at him with incomprehension.“Mayakenska. She crashed the Salyut in the Solis Planum.That was the explosion.”

“The oasis,” Kane said.

“The beginning of one, anyway. If the crater’s not deep enough, some of Verb’s antimatter can finish it up. I guess it was her way of trying to settle up.”

“Not much...not much of a trade,” Kane said, looking back at the ruins of Frontera, cooled now to within a few degrees of the plain around it.

“No,”Takahashi said.“But it’s a start.”

Kane knelt in the dirt in front of Molly.“Take this,” he said, and he put the panel in her hands.“Build ships.”

“Kane...”

“Shut up,Takahashi,” he said.There was more, but this was not the time for it. Later he would tell her about the rest of his plans, a fullfledged relief mission with food and medicine and whatever else they needed.A treaty with Aeroflot to keep them safe. But he would tell her later, by radio, once he was on his way back to Earth.

“Where’s Lena?” he asked.

“Inside,” Takahashi said.“She’s staying.There’s a lot of work for her here.They’re all staying,even Hanai.That doesn’t matter—the two of us can run the ship.But we have to have that panel.That’s what we came for.”

“Is it?” Kane said.“I don’t think so.”

“Kane...”

“We’ve got time,” Kane said.“We need these people, they need ss. We’ll work it out.” Even without eye contact Kane could feel Takahashi’s will bending to the new order.“Go on ahead,”he said.“Get the ship ready. I’ll be there in a minute.”

Takahashi turned and walked away.

“Curtis?” Molly said.

Kane leaned toward her, put both his hands on her helmet and held it facing his own.

“He’s dead,” Kane said.

Her hands closed around the panel, and she seemed to nod; she got up and carried it toward the airlock.

Kane had a vision of her, standing under the Martian sky, hair blowing in the wind, dressed in a heavy jacket and mask, but in the open air, thick, green shrubbery at her feet.

The vision was his own, not a product of the implant; his voices were silent. He wondered if Molly would hear them when her time came, if she would see the ghost of Odysseus in the video screens of the ships that would take her to Io and Titan and on to the stars.

The colors of the night began to shimmer and bleed until the Martian landscape glowed like Reese’s gateway. Only a force of will held Kane’s perceptions together as he walked down the hillside that would lead him back to his ship, back to the Earth, back to his kingdom.